Rachel Maddow on shutting down the state-run press in Libya

I’m still trying to get caught up from stuff that happened a week or so ago, so you’ll have to bare with me if you’ve already heard about this.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow usually does a decent job at reporting. She definitely has a perspective, and it’s usually completely in line with the Democratic Party line. Sometimes she criticizes them for giving in too much to Republicans and for being the wimps they are, but more often than not her editorializing crosses over into the same kind of partisan propaganda you get at Fox.

So it’s pretty weird for her to have a guest on where, through her questions, Maddow appears to take a more authoritarian position. But that’s what happened when she had MSNBC military consultant Jack Jacobs on her program. Here’s what she asked him:

One of the things that people have questioned is if the U.S. has this high level of electronic capability, why is Libyan state TV still on the air? Is that not one of the things they would want to shut down?

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting points out that this idea of taking out the state press in a country with which the US is at war is the same kind of thing Fox advocated during the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, along with several examples. The style in rhetoric is different, but the message is the same: Hey, we’re here to liberate you people, but the first thing we’ve got to do to free you from this dictator is to shut down news organizations we don’t happen to like. Once you only have the press we like, then you’ll really be “free.”

The FAIR report above is in a sense a little unfair to Maddow in comparing her to people advocating bombing journalists. The context of her discussion with Jacobs was the military’s ability to jam communications. The context of the Fox comments was bombing and killing journalists. The former’s called prior restraint; the latter’s a war crime. One means that some people can’t do their jobs, the other means that people end up getting killed. Still, it’s disappointing to see MSNBC cheerlead so enthusiastically for war in the way they have been lately.

Jeremy Scahill on Ed Schultz

Hey, let’s all watch this video from 2003 last week where  Fox News MSNBC blowhard Ed Schultz scolds Jeremy Scahill for not blindly trusting President Bush Obama over the war in Iraq Libya.

It’s really pretty amazing to see how blatantly Schultz copies the defense for war used so recently by his political adversaries while Bush was in power. But then he pretends it’s totally different because of how Obama went through the UN to get authorization for the use of force. So apparently the only problem Schultz can really say he had with the Iraq war was that no such authorization was sought, and not that it was a pointless waste of lives and money to try to force democracy on a country externally.

Misleading headline of the day

As a lefty commie pinko peacenik, I was encouraged by this headline (“Air Force Is Through With Predator Drones”) of Spencer Ackerman’s post on Wired‘s Danger Room blog. Great! Now maybe we’ll stop doing counterproductive shit like bombing funerals in Pakistan because there might be a terrorist there – which would then set off an infinite regress of “terrorist funeral” drone bombings until everyone in the region is too afraid to ever go to another funeral again.

Then I read the lede.

Wave a tear-stained handkerchief for the drone that changed the face of air war: The Air Force won’t buy any more Predators.

Oh, so they’re just going to stop buying them. Well, that just means that we’ll stop using drones after the ones which have been purchased are worn out or destroyed, right? Here’s the next sentence in Ackerman’s post:

The Reaper drone is about to be in full effect.

Oh I see what you did there. In the same way that people refer to photocopies as Xeroxes® or to tissues as Kleenex®, I had thought of Predator® drone as a generic term for all drones instead of a brand name. So now we’ve got the Reaper®, and next will be something called the Avenger®.

Apparently the Predator, despite its name, wasn’t designed to carry weapons. Those capabilities weren’t added on until afterwards. But the Reaper and presumably the Avenger too, definitely are. And now lots of other countries are all like how I am with this.

WikiLeaks v. State Department

There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.

The usual cast of clowns are up in arms about this, calling for a quasi-Stalinist government stranglehold of information and war on the press for reporting  embarrassing facts about them. Republican Congressman Pete King of Long Island, NY, is calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist organization, and the reality television star / internet troll Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the Taliban.  She also suggested that the government use “cyber tools” in order to track him down. Perhaps the cyber police could use their cyber tools in order to backtrace it. And when that happens, consequences will never be the same.

But the American right wing isn’t the only political faction angry with WikiLeaks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that WikiLeaks is part of an American plot against his country with the goal of stopping Iranian nuclear capabilities because some of the leaked cables contain pleas from other countries in the region calling on the American political leadership to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

To be fair, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the Taliban. For one thing, Iran is mostly Shia while the Taliban is Sunni. But when you’ve got two opposing sides, like the political leaderships of America and Iran, and they both accuse a journalistic organization of being on the side of their enemy, then that’s a pretty strong indication that the journalistic organization in question is not a part of either camp. They’re just doing their job. And that job happens to involve publishing information which will make powerful people in all camps extremely angry.

I normally stay away from sports metaphors, but if you’ve got two opposing teams both of which accuse the referee of favoring their opponents, then similarly that would be a pretty strong indication that the ref is actually being fair and that it’s the players who are biased in their own favor. WikiLeaks is like that kind of referee, but obviously on a much more significant scale.

So the whining of world political leaders over WikiLeaks have basically here been reduced to the level of discourse normally reserved for Buffalo sports fans. Or even, now, the players themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. It’s pathetic.

Joe Lieberman has also weighed in on the subject. He, like many others, is of the opinion that WL puts American lives at risk, but stops short of calling them a terrorist organization. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs also reiterated the claim that WL puts American lives at risk. But this seems to be largely just chest-pounding, since neither statements contain any specific information in the now-public cables which connect the data to any risk at all. Lieberman and Gibbs are simply asserting that claim without any data to support their assertions. And it can’t reasonably be said that drawing a specific connection between the cables and supposed danger to American diplomats must remained classified because thanks to WikiLeaks and the newspapers involved, those cables are now available to the public.

The only way that the position of “WL endangers Americans” can be maintained would be if a much more general connection were to be made. For example, since the release of these documents makes the DoS look bad, then other countries might be less willing to cooperate with them. But that would be the case for any reporting which reflected poorly on the State Department. Taken to its logical conclusion, that line of thinking would mean a necessary prior restraint on any reporting on the State Department, which would be a problem in a country with something like a First Amendment and a Supreme Court which rules against prior restraint.

If that weren’t bad enough for this “OMG Julian Assange endangers Americans” argument, there’s one final nail in the coffin here. Prior to the release of these documents, WL offered to review the information by proxy with the State Department, just as they had with the Pentagon in the previous cases involving military issues. Here is a link to the relevant correspondences from the UK’s Index on Censorship, but this is the important quote which gives lie to this claim about how the State Department would do anything to prevent these alleged risks to American lives, from State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh:

We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials

So even if you were to believe the ‘putting lives at risk’ claim at face value, the underlying and unspoken claim that the State Department cares very much about these risks is completely ridiculous. They clearly don’t care enough about these imaginary risks to bother talking to a few icky computer nerd hackers. Gross!

Republicans are more anti-gay than we’re anti-war

Back when opposition to the Iraq war started to gain steam, activists tried to pressure like-minded members of Congress to put an end to the whole thing by cutting off funding by voting against the annual Defense Authorization Act. Here’s how it would normally go:

Activists: Hey! Why are you voting for funding the war if you’re against it?

Politician: Well, even if we were to end the war we’d still need to fund a withdrawal. So it doesn’t make any sense to vote against defense funding if your goal is to stop the war.

Activists: *Grumble*

But now Republicans blocked the same Defense Authorization Act in order to delay the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. So when the politicians which the anti-war activists went after told us that it was political suicide to block defense spending in order to shape military policy, they were telling us a lie.

The Taliban is on the side of the anti-”Ground Zero Mosque” protesters

One of my first posts on this blog when I started it about a year ago quoted the Washington Independent on the issue of pre-emptive detention:

“We appreciate that the United States has security concerns about Yemen, but continuing to hold these men without charge is morally wrong, is in violation of court orders, and it’s handing al-Qaeda a recruiting tool,” said Letta Taylor, a researcher for Human Rights Watch…”

Later I wrote about Anwar al-Awlaki and how President Obama authorized his assassination, even if he’s found to be outside of any battlefield in which the US military is engaged. Here’s one of the problems I had with that policy:

And what’s more is that the perceived positive effects of such an assassination are pretty unlikely to actually happen. It’s not going to destabilize al Qaeda. If anything it’d give them a martyr and a recruiting mantra.

And later I wrote about a NY Times piece by Nicholas Krystoff on the cost and allocation of resources in the Afghanistan war:

Some other comparisons of costs really bring home the waste of the military occupation of Afghanistan. The money spent on deploying a single soldier there could be used to build 20 schools. A single cruise missile’s price tag is equivalent to 11 schools. And really, which is more corrosive to fundamentalist Islam: Cruise missiles that kill families and give recruiting slogans to al Qaeda, or education?

So there’s this recurring theme here. The policies which are based on this idea of a culture war between the Muslim world and the West are in the interests of the fringe elements of Islam which want to escalate this global conflict. Radical Muslim terrorist networks actually like it when US foreign policy fits with their demonization of all Americans. It gives their propaganda an element of truth which the average potential suicide bomber on the street can relate to. It bridges the gap between those with legitimate grievances regarding American foreign policy and our support for autocratic regimes in the Middle East and the committed religious fanatics who would hate the evil secular Americans no matter what. And now this same phenomenon of appeasing the terrorists by adopting short-sighted, emotionally-fueled, reactionary policies is applying to our domestic policies, specifically in the case of the Park 51 Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. From Newsweek:

“By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.”

Zabihullah speculates about an increase in potential future attacks, but you don’t even need to depend on those kinds of predictions to see the effect this “controversy” is having on the Afghan public. Apparently the effect is already apparent:

Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall—so tailor-made to show how “anti-Islamic” America is—that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. “We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,” Zabihullah says. “Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.”

Zabihullah’s coldness in how he reacts with joy to such atrocities definitely fits with the popular perception of how radical Muslims don’t care about human life. So it’s difficult to see why this connection is so rarely made, especially amongst US policymakers. Our enemies won’t be deterred by idiotic protesters trying to stop the community center of death. That just encourages them. They care more about the great mosque in the sky than they do about the average NYC Muslims looking for a place to go on Fridays, whom the radical Muslims view as too liberal, assimilated, and Americanized for their tastes anyways.

It’s the “end” of the Iraq war

The President is delivering a speech later today to announce the supposed end of the Iraq war. But as far as I’ve gathered, there isn’t even a substantial change in our foreign policy inre: Iraq today. Or even yesterday, or the day before. There was an announcement made by MSNBC a week and a half ago where the last full US combat brigade left Iraq.

So if you break that down, that would mean that brigades which are only partially for combat would not necessarily have left. And then you still have the “non-combat troops” tasked with completing the training of the Iraqi police and military. And for each one of those “non-combat troops,” there are two private contractors and/or mercenaries whom are not really affected by this pseudo-deadline except to the extent that their job is dependent on the presence of “full US combat brigades.” It’s not so much the qualitative change those of us who have been against the war were hoping for as much as it’s a quantitative reduction of an ongoing military occupation.

And seriously, I don’t buy this whole idea of “non-combat troops.” There have been a lot of military officials making a big deal of how the remaining troops won’t be doing any fighting. But I haven’t yet heard a journalist ask any of them what these “non-combat troops” are to do in response to an attack by insurgents. I would think they would, well, combat the people shooting at them. Right? Either they would combat them, in which case they can’t be said to be “non-combat;” or they wouldn’t, which is just absurd.

It could be that by “not fighting,” these military officials mean that troops aren’t actively seeking out insurgents and so the chances of something like this happening are greatly reduced. That would be a fair point, but the whole nature of this war from its beginning has blurred the line between what used to be seen as illegal war actions and legitimate defense. We were told that our military involvement in the Middle East is a “preemptive defense,” a way to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” And so the supporters of the war would object to terms like “invasion” and “occupation” on the grounds that the whole thing was, at its core, a form of defense.

It’s not like any of that matters to Iraqis though. None of the families of casualties from this point on are going to be consoled by the fact that their loved ones were killed by a stray bullet fired by “non-combat troops” post August 2010 when they would have been outraged if they were killed by a specifically-designated combat troop in 2003 through the present. This kind of distinction really matters to the audience of the occupation moreso than those actually involved in it.

The same defense of the war in 2003 can now be applied on a smaller scale to the prolonged quasi-withdrawal of 2010-whenever.And at the same time the Democrats can hope to capitalize in the mid-term elections on their “end” of the war. In the end, this is more about the superficial talking points than any substantial change in the real situation.

The 5 Worst Quacks Around Today

[Re-posted at The BEAST]

I’m going to have to limit this list to people who are currently practicing some form of quackery, because if I tried to make a historical list I’d feel compelled to handicap for that person’s period in history. So Isaac Newton, who was literally one of the smartest people ever, believed in alchemy. The great 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler believed in astrology. Lots of the ancient Greek philosophers believed in demons. Demons that controlled their thoughts. Seriously. But you’ve really got to cut them some slack because of how primitive human understanding was in their times. If you’re living in a technologically advanced society today, as the five below are, you really have no excuse for that kind of ignorance. So to make it a level playing field, here are what I think are the worst purveyors of antiscientific pseudomedicine around today.

Jenny McCarthy

There’s a significance to this picture. The website advertised across her boobs is one McCarthy used to run, and it no longer exists. You wouldn’t know it from reading her antivaccine rants on the HuffPo nowadays, but Jenny McCarthy used to believe that her son was a something called an “indigo child.” Indigo children are supposed to represent the next stage of human evolution, according to some New Age whackaloon named Nancy Ann Tappe. It’s apparently pretty important that they have blond hair and blue eyes. They are supposed to have paranormal powers, and exploring those powers early in life seems to have the effect of making them appear to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. But they’re NOT AUTISTIC. They’re just… you know, special. Like little, supernatural, card-counting, Aryan snowflakes.

But the problem with Indigo Children is that eventually they grow up to be Indigo Adults and are expected to take on Indigo Responsibilities and an Indigo Spouse and an Indigo Mortgage, maybe even get an Indigo Job which allows them to make an Indigo profit off of their Indigo paranormal powers. And the problem with this (SPOILER ALERT) is that the whole idea of the Indigo kids is a ridiculous lie. So they never manage to demonstrate their paranormal abilities in any meaningful test comparable to any test a normal employer would use on a job applicant.

So if her child’s still going to be a precious and unique snowflake, Jenny McCarthy would need to find a new narrative which doesn’t involve him reading minds or astral projection or that kind of crap. This is where the disgraced Dr. Andrew Wakefield enters the story with his stories about how the MMR vaccine causes autism, even though it doesn’t. And this meeting of Wakefield’s data manipulation and lying with McCarthy’s (and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey’s) abuse of celebrity status is the origin of the modern antivaccination movement.

The gist of it is that antivaccers think that “toxins” in vaccines cause injuries to children. One of those injuries we refer to as autism. And what’s funny is that the “toxins” still allegedly cause those injuries years after they’ve been removed from the shots. You might consider that and think that it proves them wrong, but you’re stupid for thinking that. It really proves just how super-powerful these “toxins” get when they cause autism without even actually being there.

I’m sure lots of former and current models are intelligent and thoughtful people, but McCarthy really does fit the stereotype of the ditzy blonde, combined with a jaw-dropping arrogance and cold-heartedness. For example:

Response to a question about her interacting with actual medical doctors: I did a lot of digging on my own, the “University of Google” (source)

My greatest lesson is always to trust the mommy instinct. Always trust yourself. Always trust the gut instinct. It will never let you down. (source)

Response to how scientists disagree with her: My science is Evan. He’s at home. That’s my science. (source)

Autism, as I see it, steals the soul from a child; then, if allowed, relentlessly sucks life’s marrow out of the family members, one by one…(source)

I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit. If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.(source)

You might be thinking that spreading this kind of weird, eugenics-y conspiracy theories would only affect those who buy into it. If a parent wants to have their kid die from an easily preventable disease, that’s their right, right? But even if you accept that those children are just the property of their parents, refusing to vaccinate still affects others by threatening herd immunity. More on that later.

But there is a lighter, unintentionally funny side of McCarthy. Here she is on CNN:

Mercury is the second worst neurotoxin on the planet, and that’s a fact. Get it out of our shots!

OK, got that? Jenny McCarthy does not want anyone injecting the second worst neurotoxin on the planet. But what about the first worst neurotoxin on the planet?

I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally, so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.

So when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to immunize against preventable diseases, that’s an outrage that must be stopped. But when you’re injecting something with trace amounts of neurotoxins to get rid of a few wrinkles, that’s the act of a “savior.”

Leonard Horowitz

Horowitz is on a mission to tell the world about how AIDS was created by the government. If you’ve ever wondered where Jeremiah Wright got that idea, this is the guy.

Horowitz runs a publishing company in Idaho called Tetrahedron which sells his books and DVDs about how you can use the Bible to cure diseases and walk on water and how the government 9/11′d the WTC themselves and how the Apocalypse is imminent and much, much more. He also sells lots of “alternative medicine” (i.e. not medicine) through the “Healthy World Store.” Let’s take a look at some of the products.

Breath of the Earth Hawaiian Holy Water
HYPERCHARGE NATURAL HEALING using Hawaiian Holy Water researched by Dr. Len Horowitz and Dr. Masaru Emoto. This water holds the spiritual blessing of the Big Island of Hawaii, revered by Kahuna’s as the sacred rebirthing place spiraling down from the center the universe. This supercharged blessed water is recommended for its “purgative and restorative” properties. It ousts negativity and general pathology, and lays the foundation for the creation of paradise.
Price: $24.20

Yeah, that’s right: $24 for a bottle of water. And the justification for that in its description is basically a bottled water commercial on acid. That’s the least expensive product, tied with a colon cleansing product. Here’s another product Horowitz is trying to sell to the gullible:

Holy Harmony Perfect Circle of Sound Tuning Forks (Complete Set)
Used for healing, chakra balancing, or instrument tuning, the 9 Holy Harmony Tuning Forks contain the 6 frequencies (“the original Solfeggio”) found in “Healing Code” by Dr. Leonard Horowitz and Dr. Joseph Puleo; plus 3 newly discovered frequencies completing this numeric series and creating “God’s Perfect Circle of Sound.”
Price: $188.00

Yeah, that or you could just buy a set of tuning forks from Amazon for under $20. That’s somewhere close to a 1,000% mark-up, just for the pleasure of having Horowitz’s name and delusional ravings about magical frequencies attached to it.

One of his old products was deleted from the internets, but Horowitz claimed that it could treat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome back in 2003 when that was a thing. The “treatment” was a naturopathic / homeopathic nasal spray. The FDA did their job and explained to Horowitz that they weren’t having any of it, which explains why you need to use the Wayback Machine to find the original and hilarious press release.

OK, now here’s the most despicable one of all:

C-Cure Membership
Few products can honestly claim to cure cancer, but C-CURE challenges the risky old slash, burn and poison approach of chemo and radiation therapies and even expensive and risky removal of many skin cancers. C-CURE stands for Concentrated – Cancer Undermining and Restorative Emulsion. THIS PRODUCT IS FREE FOR EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY AS PER FDA’s EXTORTIONISTIC COERCIVE REGULATIONS SOLELY SERVING THE CANCER INDUSTRY.
Price: $386.00

How much cognitive dissonance can the human mind stand? Well, it’s apparently enough to be able to rant about the “CANCER INDUSTRY” within a short description of a sham product you’re selling for almost four hundred bucks. Notice how it mentions curing cancer, but doesn’t actually say that it is a cure for cancer. It “challenges” normal cancer treatments. That’s a trick these hucksters use to get around the OPPRESSIVE AND TYRANNICAL REGULATIONS OF THE FOOD & DRUG ADMINISTRATION. As a quick side note, if you listen to the first link in this section, which is a debate between Horowitz and a grad student on HIV/AIDS, you’ll notice that he really does speak in caps-lock mode very often.

Speaking of that debate, I’m going to finish this section with how his opponent broke down what is wrong with this kind of approach to an attempt at medicine and how it reveals what she perceives as Horowitz’s deceit regarding the supposed efficacy of these products:

Lets pretend [Horowitz] really, REALLY thinks that [his crap] can ‘help people’. Why doesnt he do what is necessary to get this information mainstream (and I dont mean publishing straight to consumer books)? Why doesnt he get in a lab and do research? If I screwed up in the lab and accidentally *cured* HIV with a mixture of Flonase, coffee, and calcium, I would beg my boss for a few supplies to run some preliminary experiments! If they turned out well, I’d call the people who make Flonase and beg them to give it a try. If they ignored me, ‘Id take it to their competition. If they ignored me, I’d write a grant and try to do it myself. I would not stock up on Flonase, coffee, and calcium and make little bottles of it in my bathtub and sell it to AIDS patients for $189.99. Nothing about his behavior makes me think he thinks the crap he’s selling actually works, especially considering the gravity of the diseases he proclaims he can cure.

Jim McCormick

Admittedly this guy doesn’t have the track record of his colleagues on this list. He’s really only known for one thing, and it doesn’t involve Satanic vaccines or Nazi doctors who hate mothers or anything like that.

McCormick is the inventor of a product called the ADE 651. It made the news a while back in the NY Times and Esquire and the BBC and NPR and… well, you get the point.

The James Randi Educational Foundation is credited with bringing attention to the ADE 651 so-called “bomb detector” and the British company (ATSC) who manufactures and profits off of it. The JREF issued a simple challenge for anyone to test it under controlled conditions with positive results. If anyone could do that, they would win a million dollars from the JREF. So far the challenge has remained unmet.

The ADE 651 initially didn’t even contain any electronic components. It’s basically just a stick in a box. Here is what it looks like:

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that this thing was being used by our troops in Iraq up until recently. And some Iraqi police are still using it. Here is what one of the device’s defenders had to say about it:

Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs. I don’t care what they say. I know more about bombs than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.
-Major-General Jehad al-Jabiri of the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives

Even though the aforementioned JREF challenge had been in place since October of 2008, the media outrage over McCormick’s fraud really took off during a series of IED bombings while the ADE 651 was being widely used in Iraq. The British government was similarly outraged, arrested the executive of ATCS, Ltd. – after the government had already paid that company at least $85 million for these devices – and banned the export of ADE 651s.

But it all started with one “entrepreneur” named Jim McCormick who decided to put some plastic together and sell the Ideomotor Effect for profit at the expense of innocent lives. What a class act.

Kevin Trudeau

If you’ve ever found yourself in a drug-induced haze in front of a television at 3:45 AM during the middle of the last decade (and let’s face it – if you’re reading this then that applies to you), then you know Kevin Trudeau. He’s the infomercial guy who wants to tell you about all the natural cures “they” don’t want you to know about. He also wants to tell you about the free money “they” don’t want you to know about. But have you heard about Kevin Trudeau’s larceny, credit card fraud, SEC lawsuit for running an illegal pyramid scheme, Federal Trade Commission fines, contempt of court charges, and subsequent prison sentence – all of which “they” don’t want you to know about?

Kevin Trudeau started off his career as a fraud by running credit card scams. He went off to Prison University for that, where he teamed up with a fellow inmate “they” don’t want you to know about. On the outside they started up a multilevel marketing scam “they” don’t want you to know about. So he was originally selling Horowitz-esque products, like a necklace with a magical piece of metal to stop cell phones and radio waves from microwaving your brain. It’s not quite a tin-foil hat, but it’s pretty close. He’s also very into colloidal silver, which gives your skin a nice, permanent silvery hue which “they” most certainly don’t want you to know about.

By 2004, the Federal Trade Commission was so fed up with Trudeau (and rightfully so), that they banned him from selling anything on infomercials other than “informational publicans,” which are protected by the First Amendment.

Now you’ve really got to kind of begrudgingly admire Trudeau for how he took hold of the crisis of being banned and Jujitsu-flipped it into an opportunity to rake in even more cash. From there, he kept on making those infomercials most people know him from, but this time he just sold his books. Since the products he was selling on television were just his books, he was only obligated to tell the truth about the contents of his books – which of course themselves were simply advertisements for his products in book form. His book could say that purple rabbits will invade the Czech Republic tomorrow; but as long as he remembered to insert a phrase like “in my book” in the middle of his late night squawkings, he could talk about the purple rabbits and still legally be considered “informative.”

So instead of buying airtime to hock his useless products directly to his marks, Trudeau was buying airtime to sell his advertisements to an audience which would then pay him again for those same products. So the FTC decision to ban Trudeau from infomercials with a loophole unfortunately had the opposite of the deterrent effect it was intended to have. So much for that shadowy government conspiracy always keeping the non-working naturopath man down.

His books encouraged a lot of thoughtless behavior, like avoiding chemotherapy when you have cancer, sunscreen, deodorant, vaccinations and really any form of medicine. Eventually Trudeau couldn’t help but violate the terms of his infomercial loophole by lying about the contents of his own book about weight loss secrets, which he had allegedly written. In the press release “they” don’t want you to know about, the FTC fined Trudeau $5 million and banned him from infomercials altogether.

And the real bitch of it is that even after all that, the guy still has a net worth of $10 million.

Oh, and by the way, here is a shot of a page in one of his books where he endorses Dianetics:

Meryl Dorey

Meryl Dorey is antivaccine activist in Australia, but she was born in America. She heads the Australian Vaccination Network. They lobby against vaccination, speak out against it – along with all other medicine – and in favor of homeopathy. Even though their mission statement claims that they are “dedicated to the idea that health can be achieved and maintained without the use of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines,” until recently they claimed that they weren’t anti-vaccine. They claimed they were just spreading information so that people could make their own choices. As if frightening parents and lying to them and then mumbling, “But do what you want,” afterwards doesn’t count as advocacy.

Dorey also wrote in her book Voodoo Children that nobody dies from diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and other vaccine-preventable illnesses. This is just not true, and that fact was brought home to her when a four week old child named Dana McCaffrey died from pertussis. The McCaffreys lived in an area of New South Wales, Australia, which had a very low rate of vaccine compliance. This stopped herd immunity in the region, which is supposed to protect infants and people who for legitimate medical reasons can not take vaccinations.

The AVN immediately began harassing the bereaved parents, claiming that they and the government were lying about their baby’s illness. When those conspiracy theories were debunked, Dorety started claiming that the pertussis vaccine wasn’t effective even though it is.

If you wanted to invent a fictional character that started off with a dangerous and misanthropic belief who denied all the contrary evidence and twisted around facts so that they were more complicit with her conclusion, then that character would be indistinguishable from the real-life Dorey.

Now the bright side to all this is that Dorey’s organization is in financial and legal trouble. The New South Wales Office of Liquor, Gaming, & Racing has been investigating their legal authority to raise funds, and just two weeks ago they ruled that they had “detected a number of breaches of charity fundraising laws.” Dorey hasn’t commented yet, but hopefully they’ll find some nice little island for her somewhere near Antarctica. No vaccines there, you see.

WikiLeaks v. Pentagon

So it’s been a week since WikiLeaks published the leaked internal US military documents which detail some aspects of the occupation of Afghanistan which the administration would rather not emphasize. Like how Pakistan’s ISI is funneling our ‘aid’ back to the Taliban, which they then use to attack our troops. And civilian casualties are being massively underreported. And there’s a secret task force which captures and executes Taliban leaders. Oh yeah, and the US military is paying Afghani journalists to write favorable stories about the occupation.

Certain people can be expected to react to this leak in certain ways. Republicans will insist that we firebomb the internet and every last one of its many series of pneumatic tubes. Liz Cheney just now said something like that, as if anyone gives a shit.  Newt Gingrich is calling it treason, etc.

If you’ve paid attention to the Obama administration’s pattern of hostility towards whistleblowers, then it’s not very difficult to predict how they would react. Here’s White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs being questioned:

Q Thanks, Robert. Two questions, a few on WikiLeaks. What was the President’s reaction once he heard about the leaking –
MR. GIBBS: Well, I remember talking to the President sometime last week after discussions with news organizations that these stories were coming. Look, I think our reaction to this type of material, a breach of federal law, is always the same, and that is whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it — besides being against the law — has a potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe.

OK, got that? This is all VERY SERIOUS and will PUT ALL OF OUR TROOPS IN DANGER, and by the way it’s also a FEDERAL CRIME. If it’s putting our troops in danger to have this information publicly available, it must be the case that this is new information in the public sphere. Because if it were already known, then there would be no danger in releasing it. Right? Well, only a few questions later, Gibbs contradicts that line of reasoning:

MR. GIBBS:  Well, let’s understand a few things about the documents.  Based on what we’ve seen, I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed either by you all or by representatives of the U.S. government for quite some time.

So the WikiLeaks data dump is at the same time both YAWN OLD NEWS and VERY SERIOUS TREASONOUS TROOP-KILLING CRIMES. Julian Assange must be both a dangerous anti-American criminal and a harmless kid living in his parent’s basement all at the same time. That’s pretty much how it plays out inside the heads of people like Robert Gibbs and the President.

But all that’s not that surprising, especially given the aforementioned administration’s record on whistleblowers and the internet in general. What’s more surprising is that one of the three publications given access to the documents pre-publication, the NY Times, has basically been toeing the administration’s line on their own leak. And the Washington Post has been producing their copy on the subject pretty much directly from the Republicans’ playbook. The two other newspapers (Der Spiegel and The Guardian) have been a bit more responsible and independent, to their credit.

If you’ve been following the ongoing saga of WikiLeaks, you might remember the ‘Collateral Murder’ video they released a few months ago of the US military shooting at a group of people from a helicopter which turned out to be civilians and a journalist. US Army Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning was charged with forwarding the video based on an online conversation he had with a hacker named Adrian Lamo who subsequently informed on him. Manning is now in the brig in Virginia, where he faces a sentence of up to 52 years. And now the NY Times is quoting unnamed Pentagon officials who claim that Manning is a “person of interest” in the case of these newly-released documents. Here you can find a support group for Manning.

The Pentagon’s also going after WikiLeaks founder/editor Julian Assange, who’s more or less on the run. He is wanted for questioning, presumably to verify or deny whether or not Manning was the source of the Afghan War Diary. And oh yeah, they’d also like WikiLeaks to be shut down, please. For now, Assange is staying out of the US and responding strongly to comments from the administration. As a side note, he’s also trying to turn Iceland into a journalistic refugee’s paradise.

Now two more things just happened in the past day or two. First, a WikiLeaks volunteer named Jacob Appelbaum was detained, searched, and interrogated by US Customs officials at the Newark airport. They asked him to decrypt his laptop, an offer he refused. Then they confiscated it, but his laptop had no storage device and therefore there was nothing for the officials to search. He was later approached by FBI agents at a conference where he gave a talk in place of Julian Assange, who could not attend for reasons which should by now be pretty obvious.

The second recent development was WikiLeaks posting a mysterious encrypted 1.4 GB file called ‘insurance’ on their Afghan War Logs page. There are no instructions or details on what it’s supposed to be, but the general consensus is that a password will be issued in the event that anything fishy happens to WikiLeaks, Assange, or anyone associated with them. This is turning into a very interesting conflict, much better than anti-war protesters v. cops. But don’t bother downloading the file just to see if the password is “password,” that’s already been checked.

Krystof on the cost of the war in Afghanistan

Nicholas Krystoff of the NY Times has a great article on the cost of the US’ longest war / military occupation. It plays on an angle that is, if you ask me, kind of missing the point; but it appeals to the more xenophobic of our population, and it turns out that there are a lot more of them than which most of us would be comfortable. To me, the stronger appeal of stopping the war is in that it’s causing more unnecessary harm than good. I could imagine a case being made for it if that were not the case even if the cost were great.

He starts off with a pretty simple fact:

The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — combined.

Now you’re probably thinking that’s an obvious statement since he’s probably only talking about the cost of those wars in terms of the rate of inflation of those times. But those are all adjusted for inflation before you even combine them, according to this report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service. And that’s just this year – we’ve already had 8 other years leading up to this one.

Some other comparisons of costs really bring home the waste of the military occupation of Afghanistan. The money spent on deploying a single soldier there could be used to build 20 schools. A single cruise missile’s price tag is equivalent to 11 schools. And really, which is more corrosive to fundamentalist Islam: Cruise missiles that kill families and give recruiting slogans to al Qaeda, or education? As long as we’re not talking about the Wahabi madrasahs that get funded by outsiders and the Taliban in the absence of secular education, the latter’s bound to work and the former is bound to fail.

And it has failed, and failed hard. Today’s the last day of July, and this month has set a new record for US casualties in Afghanistan. The old record? Well, that was June, 2010. So much for winning their hearts and minds. Obama can fire all the generals and tweak all the knobs he wants, but this war’s going to remain a complete and utter failure when it’s pursued in this way.

North Korean government is calling in our debts

The North Korean government is demanding that the United States pay $65,000,000,000,000 in damages for sixty years of hostility. To be fair, sixty years ago we fought a war there. But all those zeros above means they’re asking for 65 TRILLION. We should pay them in Monopoly money. Maybe they wouldn’t notice, and would then proudly display the payment for members of the public to see like they do with obviously fake gifts from the outside world. From ABC Australia:

[KCNA, North Korea's official news agency] also claims 60 years of US sanctions have caused a loss of $US13.7 trillion by 2005, while property losses were estimated at $US16.7 trillion.

Doesn’t the idea of paying reparations for sanctions kind of undermine the point of a sanction? Yeah, we know it cost you money to not trade with us. Those losses – even if those figures were correct – aren’t some accidental byproduct. That’s how pressure is applied on the North Korean government.

no end in sight

• “The Department of Defense announced yesterday the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Pfc. Jake W. Suter, 18, of Los Angeles, Calif., died May 29 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.  He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.”

• “The Department of Defense announced yesterday the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pfc. Alvaro R. Regalado Sessarego, 37, of Virginia Beach, Va., died May 30 at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, of injuries sustained April 18 from a non-combat related incident at Dahuk, Iraq.  He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, Fort Bliss, Texas.”

• “The Department of Defense announced yesterday the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Spc. Jonathan K. Peney, 22, of Marietta, Ga., died June 1 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when he was shot by enemy forces.  He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Ga.”

a very long war

“The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lance Cpl. Anthony A. Dilisio, 20, of Macomb, Mich., died May 30 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, IIMarine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.”

Anwar al-Awlaki

UPDATE: The Department of Justice is now considering filing charges against al-Awlaki.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen thought to be living in Yemen who makes videos praising al Qaeda. He’s also had an e-mail exchange with Nidal Malik Hasan at some point before his shooting spree at Fort Hood last November.

Earlier this month, the Obama administration authorized the targetted killing of al-Awlaki. From the NY Times:

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

There are a few problems with this, and they’re really split into two categories. On the one hand you can argue that this sets bad precedent and gives too much power to the executive branch. It’s a denial of due process even more extreme than anything the Bush administration ever did. Even if you’re in agreement with Obama on this one, there’s still the danger of future presidents abusing their power by following this precedent. These are the kinds of loftier arguments based on the principle of the rule of law which has been the foundation of western civilization.

There’s some good evidence against al-Awlaki, and it’s very unlikely that he’d be found not guilty. But the whole point of having a legal system in the first place is to find out whether or not someone is guilty of a crime. If the evidence holds up, then we can honestly say that we’ve tried our best to do justice while he’s rotting away locked up in a cell somewhere. If the evidence doesn’t hold up, then we find out that we were wrong. You win either way when you use the law instead of circumventing it.

It might even be that al-Awlaki is not even guilty of the crimes he’s accused of. Although Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent says “Any court would find him guilty of incitement” just due to his videos, other charges relating to direct involvement in terrorist activities aren’t quite so solid. From that noted commie rag which, upon investigating after 9/11 “Why They Hate Us,” discovered that the answer was because we’re SO AWESOME; Newsweek:

To begin with, it is not even known for certain that Awlaki is a member of Al Qaeda. Certainly there are suspicions, and his published statements and interviews clearly support Al Qaeda, but the organization has never acknowledged him. His name has been mentioned exactly once in 12 issues of Sada al-Malahim (“The Echo of Battles”), the organization’s bimonthly journal. And even that citation was hardly an endorsement: it merely disputed recent claims that Awlaki had been killed in a joint U.S.-Yemeni airstrike. He has never written an article, released an audiotape, or starred in a video for the organization. Each of these is an integral part of the group’s propaganda outreach that senior AQAP leaders have done multiple times.

What’s more, there is no evidence to suggest Awlaki is on AQAP’s legal council, an internal group that both provides the religious justification for attacks and guides the future direction of the organization. Nor is there even a hint that he plays anything resembling a leading role in the group.

Even his links to the two attacks are more speculative and assumed than concrete. Awlaki is known to have exchanged e-mails with Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter (he confirmed as much to Al-Jazeera), and to being in contact with Abdulmutallab, whom he called his “student.” (Abdulmutallab is thought to have attended one of Awlaki’s sermons in London.) But he never acknowledged meeting either man.

Newsweek then goes into some of the reasons to oppose this based on the second category I referred to earlier. Even if you don’t buy into the idea that the President should not be above the law and that due process is important, there’s still no good reason to just kill this guy. If he’s guilty of some of the heavier terrorism charges, he’d be an excellent source of information. It’s tough to get intelligence from a corpse.

And what’s more is that the perceived positive effects of such an assassination are pretty unlikely to actually happen. It’s not going to destabilize al Qaeda. If anything it’d give them a martyr and a recruiting mantra. They’re all pretty much as batshit crazy as it’s possible to get, but when they say that Americans don’t care about justice we’re giving them an air of legitimacy on that matter when we do crap like this.

Similar:

• Maher Arar

More collateral murder

And in similar news in the “good war,” the US military has admitted to killing three civilian women in Afghanistan after denying involvement, having claimed that they were killed by the insurgency in an “honor killing.” Two of the women were pregnant.

The initial reaction by the military was that all of the witnesses had somehow conspired to blame it all on the “innocent” members of the military. And this was accepted as the correct response even though the witnesses all seemed to be coming forth with the exact same story. If you apply Occam’s Razor, you would have to accept that they were simply telling the truth and it was the military who was lying here.

From the Times:

“And in what would be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.””

Digging bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies. Stay classy! Way to “win their hearts and minds.”

But like the earlier post, this is just another inevitable result of being in a war. And what exacerbates all this is that these wars really have no purpose behind them at all. It’s pretty much all still going on in order to perpetuate itself.

And just as a quick note here at the end, here is what might be a good reason why these senseless killings have continued for as long as they have.