Panetta

The news tonight also puts a different light on some of the reshuffling of major posts. The move of Panetta from CIA to Defense makes more sense. If this was an intelligence victory, as seems to be the case, then moving the person in charge of that to head up the remaining operations in the area offers continuity.

Petraeus in at CIA strikes me more as trying to keep him out of the upcoming presidential contest than anything else, though, again, this takes some rethinking. It may be that the general understood he would not be able to contest once OBL had been disposed of as this will be the horse BHO rides to victory next year, and is content to bide his time for 2016.

But the interesting story to tease out of here is what was Panetta's involvement in this operation and why is this leading to him going to replace Gates at Defense rather than have him remain at the CIA?

Anglachel

Bin Laden Dead - Updated

I've already read cynical responses from the anti-Obama contigent (left & right wings) and I think they are missing the real point.

Osama bin Laden is someone who declared war on the rest of humanity and has engaged in the butchery of thousands of people across four continents (North America, Europe, Africa and Asia) for more than two decades. Any justification for his violence was long ago vitiated by the purposeful targeting of ordinary civilians. It matters not that Bush & Cheney and their neocon crew used him as an excuse to engage in their own butchery. In the attack on the World Trade Center, he was attacking the world, not just the US, and everything that modernity stands for, particularly what is best about it - secularism, equal rights, equality before a rational rule of law, and the undermining of fundamentalist power structures.

Will this event be used in opportunistic ways by every political operator under the sun? Duh, and irrelevant.

This person did not care to share the world with the rest of humanity, wishing to arrogate to himself the power of life and death over all others. It is right and just that the world decline to share the world with him.

Anglachel

UPDATE - Interesting news snippet I have only seen in my local fish-wrap:
"An American official says Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion close to the Pakistani capital. 

A Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that the al-Qaida leader had been killed in Pakistan. "

This news intimates that he has been living in Pakistan under the protection of someone influential for some time.  Time to be following some money.

Revolution 2.Oh Dear

Well, shit. I spend a month mourning a death in the family and all hell breaks loose around the world. That'll teach me to take a break.

Count me among the jaundiced observers of everything from the protests in Madison to the civil war in Libya.

 As someone who makes her living from creating and deploying large scale web-based collaboration sites and always thinking of new ways to incorporate differing communications modes into those sites, I'm distinctly unimpressed by the breathless rah-rah promotion of "social network" tools as some kind of key to a new kind of revolution. If you can Tweet it, they can track it.

Like, duh.

No Such Thing as an Innocent Leak

One of the problems with the hoo-hah surrounding the release of the State Dept. documents is that there has been little attempt from any quarter to distinguish the different effects resulting from the same acts. As long as everything is connected to everything else and thus is declared good/bad as a piece, we won't understand the real impact of this event.

Let's make one thing really clear - the documents have been released. They are not just on wikileaks. Every government with an internet connection has downloaded the complete set (Just in time for the holidays!), there are mirrors, copies, bit torrents, etc., available for anyone with a modicum of computer savvy, and there are now malware emails out there enticing the unwary into clicking on the link to get the documents and actually getting some lovely bit of malicious software instead. That's how you know you've arrived - you're famous enough to be used as spam-bait. No power can reverse this distribution of information. For good or ill, they are now part of the public discourse. What remains is to analyze what has been set in motion.

What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?

Way too many people out in Ye Olde Blogosphere are getting their collective knickers in a twist over the reality that - GASP! - wikileaks is getting shut down by a combination of government and commercial actors.

Grow. The. Fuck. Up.

Foreign and Domestic

As I read various things about the wikileaks document dump, something becomes very clear. Many commenters don't or can't distinguish between domestic law and foreign policy.

First off, the laws that govern US citizens and others within our borders are specific to this geographical location. They may apply to our citizens outside our borders, but that is more complicated and will depend on where that person is - a military base, a consulate, during a diplomatic meeting, on personal vacation, etc. - and what that person is doing. Restrictions and penalties are higher for people serving the nation in an official capacity (military, diplomats, trade representatives, etc.) because they have to varying degrees the authority of the nation behind their actions.

Suspect Intelligence

Here's a thought. Most of the cables released by wikileaks aren't classified. 54% were unclassified, 40% were confidential and the remaining 6% had a higher designation. Most came from a network called SIPRNet, which is a major conduit for shared information since 9/11.

While the data is tagged as being from that source, it actually is unknown who obtained the data. Bradley Manning is a prime suspect, mostly based on the leak of the helicopter video and the testimony of Adrian Lamo. I think Manning has provided material (classified or otherwise) to Assange, but probably not the bulk of what wikileaks showed the press. He may be being used as a fall guy, and I think even with a fairly low rank, he could have seen a lot of unclassified material, but the breadth of the information along with the knowledge that it is far more than Manning (or Lamo said Manning) claimed to have downloaded makes me doubtful that there is a single source.

Wikileaks - Cui Bono?

I'm going to ruffle more than a few feathers with this post, but there are two words that come to mind when I read over the information Wikileaks is releasing.

Valerie Plame.

This smells like a rather large rat-fucking operation with information on so many fronts being made public all at once. What I see is fairly conventional politics of states, but it is sure to enrage the purists on the left and the nationalists on the right in about equal measure. The first group will wring their ineffectual hands over the evil of the government while the latter will rage at their screens over the release of state secrets.

Who is benefiting from this, really? This is designed to embarrass and compromise people, force resignations, undermine conduct of policy.

This much information being released does not happen without some serious coordination and power. This wasn't done by a few outraged whistle-blowers.

Anglachel

Update - To save pointless speculation, no, I don't think this is the White House trying to make  HRC look bad. They have their hands full making themselves look like dolts, after all. My guess is the remnants of Cheney's operation at State and in the military (potentially with help from the CIA and key news reporters) providing carefully selected stuff to an operation all too happy to tell the "truth", no matter how distorted, misleading, or lacking in context that alleged "truth" is.

No, I don't have much respect for Wikileaks. It's all too eager to play messenger for unknown interests. If you think this latest round of releases is good for anyone except the hard right, you need to get out more.

PS - Thanks, Falstaff! Good catch.

Against Conventional Wisdom Redux

On November 15, 2008, I posted an article Against Conventional Wisdom in which I laid out the reasons why Obama had some very good reasons to make a good faith offer of the Sec. of State position to Hillary. We all know how that turned out. As I re-read it tonight, two predictions stood out:

The Hard Work of Peace

The debate over the appropriateness of the Peace Prize award continues to roil the the blogospheric waters. It will end up being a political liability, I suspect, especially after Obama himself sheepishly admitted he did not deserve the prize - and accepted it anyway. A gracious declination would have made a positive impression on people like myself; those who are skeptical of Obama's actual talents but want to see him succeed because no one can afford to lose more ground to the Movement Conservatives. (For example, I am pleased to see him publicly committing to end DADT and DOMA, but will wait for tangible results before breaking out the champagne.) I wait, as do most of the reasonable skeptics I know, to see Obama personally perform the hard work of peace.

Reunion

As a partial antidote to the Nobel news that the committee decided to cast a vote that made them feel good about themselves and their moral superiority rather than recognize people who have literally risked their lives for years to bring stability and peace to their part of the world, I offer up a photo essay from Big Picture on the Boston Globe web site:

The Berlin Reunion

"Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult - but successful - expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. "

The photo essay is spectacular. Take a few minutes to view it.

The reunion of Berlin, and the eventual reunion of Germany itself, was accomplished by ordinary people seizing a "moment of madness" (to cite my old professor Ari Zolberg's classic essay) to make the impossible real. I remember being crammed into a dorm room, watching a tiny TV with horrible reception showing people pounding away at the Wall with hammers, axes, steel bars, or just using their own hands, ripping down the will of the dictators that they should be a subject and sundered people. We passed around alcohol and screamed in delight every time someone whacked another chunk away or reached through a gap to embrace someone on the other side.

The next day, the school was in party mode. Every class held was about the Wall. Ari was grinning from ear to ear, and we teased him to tell how his essay explained this particular moment, which he did. Reagan had challenged Gorbachev to "tear down the wall", but it was the ordinary person who made it happen. What Gorbachev did do was refrain from doing anything, refusing (whether through principle or necessity is irrelevant) to send in force to quell the uprising. Action and inaction combined to create a world altering event.

I am, perhaps, not as dismayed as some over awarding the prize to Obama. The committee is composed of Whole Foods Nation types and their action says far more about their personal narcissism than it does about anything else. They selected their fantasy of making the world into their image through sheer cool awesomeness. The award itself has a checkered past. As Tom Lehrer wryly commented, awarding that prize to Henry Kissenger made political satire obsolete.

I also note that the actual people in the administration doing the hard work of peace - Clinton, Holbrooke, Mitchell, and the hundreds of State Department staff who don't get their names in the papers but who get the job done - are steadily giving me hope for an effective, humane and coherent US foreign policy. I add in the work done by Robert Gates and Jim Jones and their respective staffs, too. Their tasks are made more difficult by operators like Biden and McChrystal, who try to game policy through leaks and public posturing to force the President's hand and thwart the efforts of the policy team.

If Obama was politically savvy, he would have declined the award. In truth, it is a greater burden than a support*, setting expectations on situations like Afghanistan that won't be met because national interests and political ideals do not coincide, and adding another log to the fires of resentment against Obama for being The Precious; the object of obsessive desire by a sheltered, privileged, powerful socio-economic class and a person whose real world accomplishments are negligible compared to the hype that surrounds him. It would have served him better politically for the committee to have leaked that he had been nominated but declined. I am curious as to who submitted the nomination as it would have to have been done before he even took office. The nomination submission period closed two weeks after the inauguration, but a nomination is not just sending in a name. It involves a nomination package that takes some work to prepare and submit. The groundwork for the nomination came well before the inauguration. That piece of information could also become a political negative.

Overall, the award strikes me as a tone-deaf and politically stupid move on the part of the awards committee. It comes across as hubristic and self-indulgent. It talks to those already in agreement about the superdoublegood wonderfulness of Obama and distances those who are waiting to see tangible results. To the degree that it may complicate the actual work of the State Department, it is harmful.

It does not unify the sundered people.

Anglachel

*Contra the effect of the award for Al Gore, which provided greater legitimacy to his efforts as well as slapped the Bush/Cheney administration in the face.

New Government in Japan

The LDP is out, according to the BBC.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) appears to have won a crushing victory. Their leader, Yukio Hatoyama, a political animal of the highest degree and the grandson of a former Prime Minister, has vowed to turn domestic policy more towards support of individual citizens and to be less corporatist and states that they will no longer ally so closely with the US.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Hatoyama does bring change to the government or if it is only "change".

This development bears watching.

Anglachel