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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

A captain ready to drive himself and all around him to ruin in the hunt for a white whale. It’s a well-known story, and over the years, mad Ahab in Herman Melville’s most famous novel, Moby-Dick, has been used as an exemplar of unhinged American power, most recently of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But what’s really frightening isn’t our Ahabs, the hawks who periodically want to bomb some poor country, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, back to the Stone Age. The respectable types are the true “terror of our age,” as Noam Chomsky called them collectively nearly 50 years ago. The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals, and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet, and rationalize the atrocities. They are a type that has been with us for a long time. More than a century and a half ago, Melville, who had a captain for every face of empire, found their perfect expression—for his moment and ours.

For the last six years, I’ve been researching the life of an American seal killer, a ship captain named Amasa Delano who, in the 1790s, was among the earliest New Englanders to sail into the South Pacific. Money was flush, seals were many, and Delano and his fellow ship captains established the first unofficial US colonies on islands off the coast of Chile. They operated under an informal council of captains, divvied up territory, enforced debt contracts, celebrated the Fourth of July, and set up ad hoc courts of law. When no bible was available, the collected works of William Shakespeare, found in the libraries of most ships, were used to swear oaths.

From his first expedition, Delano took hundreds of thousands of sealskins to China, where he traded them for spices, ceramics, and tea to bring back to Boston. During a second, failed voyage, however, an event took place that would make Amasa notorious—at least among the readers of the fiction of Herman Melville.

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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

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When It Comes to Process, We Are All Hypocrites

Mother Jones

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Just before lunch I wrote a post suggesting that if conservatives win their fight against Obama’s recess appointments, they’re probably just shooting themselves in the feet since the most likely victims will be fellow conservatives. Over at The Corner, Charles C. W. Cooke takes exception:

As a matter of practical politics, this may be true. Nevertheless, the “nice work, conservatives” line only makes sense if one presumes that all that matters in a system of government is raw political power, and that the role of the citizenry is to try to bend the rules for the short-term favor of their chosen party. I can only speak for myself and for the many conservatives who, like me, have kicked up a fuss over this, but I can assure you that the checks and balances contained within the Constitution really do matter to us.

….Republicans and Democrats alike ignore the Constitution when it suits them. Indeed, that politicians are self-interested and that they will subjugate principle to personal political profit is precisely why we have a codified charter of power. This notwithstanding, there is no reason for unaffiliated writers to look at these questions with such a cynical, will-to-power eye — especially when they write for an outlet that sees itself as continuing the traditions of a woman whose raison d’être was, she said, to “abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

Let’s stipulate that I’m pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of stuff. But am I wrong? My take is that liberals and conservatives tend to be tolerably consistent and principled on matters of policy. Working politicians obviously tailor their messages depending on when, where, and to whom they’re speaking, but generally speaking, liberals aren’t going to suddenly oppose national healthcare just because Obamacare is having some growing pains and conservatives aren’t going to suddenly favor high capital gains rates just because bankers have become a wee bit unpopular.

However, when it comes to matters of process, neither liberals nor conservatives tend to be very principled. Both sides have switched their view on filibuster reform based on who happens to be in power, for example. Likewise, they’ve traded places on their tolerance for broad claims of executive power between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Both sides will claim that there are subtle differences that justify these switches. Spare me. It happens too often to be anything other than picking whichever rule happens to favor your side. So here’s my question:

How many examples can we come up with in which either liberals or conservatives have consistently supported a matter of process that works against their own interests?

I’m not interested in individuals here. I’m not interested in policy issues. I’m not interested in positions that are being taken right this moment. I’m looking for things in which a significant majority of one side or the other has consistently supported a procedural matter that works against their own policy interests. Help me out here.

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When It Comes to Process, We Are All Hypocrites

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George W. Bush to Raise Money for Group That Converts Jews to Bring About Second Coming of Christ

Mother Jones

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Next week, former President George W. Bush is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser in Irving, Texas, for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group that trains people in the United States, Israel, and around the world to convince Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The organization’s goal: to “restore” Israel and the Jews and bring about about the second coming of Christ.

Messianic Jews have long been controversial for Jews of all major denominations, who object to their proselytizing efforts and their message that salvation by Jesus is consistent with Jewish theology. Last year, Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, told Politico that former Sen. Rick Santorum’s appearance at an event hosted by another Messianic Jewish organization, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, was “insensitive and offensive.” And Commentary magazine, which bills itself as a “conservative American journal of politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues,” noted, “it must be understood that the visceral distaste that the overwhelming majority of Jews have for the Messianics is not to be taken lightly.” Many Messianic Jews are Christians who have adopted aspects of Jewish ritual observance; others are Jews who share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah.

Asked about Bush’s upcoming appearance at the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute (MJBI) event, Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said, “It’s disappointing that he would give his stamp of approval to a group whose program is an express effort to convert Jews and not to accept the validity of the Jewish covenant.” Foxman was traveling overseas and unavailable to comment.

(After this story published, Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple, whom Newsweek has called the most influential rabbi in the country, tweeted, “This is infuriating.”)

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George W. Bush to Raise Money for Group That Converts Jews to Bring About Second Coming of Christ

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GOP Congressman Endorses Bogus Theory That Syria Got Its Chemical Weapons From Saddam

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Obama administration released its assessment of last week’s chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians. The US government “assesses with high confidence” that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out the attack, and that the Syrian government has a stockpile of sarin and other chemical agents. (UN chemical weapons experts are still working to confirm details regarding the attack.) This declassification was accompanied by Secretary of State John Kerry’s public statement, in which he called the attack a “crime against conscience” and “crime against humanity.”

Something of this magnitude will always provoke a stream of conspiracy theories, some wilder than others. In a radio interview on Thursday, Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) seemed to endorse one of them.

The Huffington Post reports:

“The theory then and the evidence was that Iraq was an enemy of the United States and had direct plans in either support of Al Qaeda and/or with other weapons that we found out weren’t there—which I still think they were moved to Syria,” said Terry. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the chemical weapons that have been used by Syria actually came from Iraq.”

When Becka asked whether Terry’s claim about the transfer of weapons was based on information he had received as a member of Congress, Terry replied, “Gut feeling…”

This theory isn’t new. Senior Bush administration officials publicly flirted with the idea that Iraq transferred weapons to other nations. The claim has been promoted on conservative media and Fox News many times over the years. In 2007, Mitt Romney said that it was “entirely possible” that weapons of mass destruction were moved from Iraq to Syria during the run-up to the Iraq war. The thing is that there is absolutely zero credible evidence that this was ever the case. I called up the State Department to ask about the theory the congressman rehashed. The first spokesperson I talked to simply laughed. The second could only say that the State Department doesn’t “have any information on that.”

For a firmer rebuttal, here’s an AP report from January 2005:

Intelligence and congressional officials say they have not seen any information—never “a piece,” said one—indicating that WMD or significant amounts of components and equipment were transferred from Iraq to neighboring Syria, Jordan or elsewhere…The Bush administration acknowledged…that the search for banned weapons is largely over. The Iraq Survey Group’s chief, Charles Duelfer, is expected to submit the final installments of his report in February. A small number of the organization’s experts will remain on the job in case new intelligence on Iraqi WMD is unearthed.

But the officials familiar with the search say U.S. authorities have found no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein transferred WMD or related equipment out of Iraq.

A special adviser to the CIA director, Duelfer declined an interview request through an agency spokesman. In his last public statements, he told a Senate panel last October that it remained unclear whether banned weapons could have been moved from Iraq.

“What I can tell you is that I believe we know a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points,” he said. “But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say.”

Last week, a congressional official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said suggestions that weapons or components were sent from Iraq were based on speculation stemming from uncorroborated information.

After the subsequent report was released, Duelfer gave an interview to PBS NewsHour in which he expressed doubt that Iraq transferred WMDs to Syria prior to the US-led invasion. “Syria, we had some intelligence that perhaps some materials, suspicious materials, had been moved there,” he said. “We looked as closely as we could at that, there were a few leads which we were not able to fully run down, largely because of the security situation, but it’s my judgment that had substantial stocks, important stocks been moved to Syria, someone would have told something to us about that.”

And in the years since, no new evidence has come to light suggesting otherwise. This all seems to conflict with Rep. Terry’s “gut.”

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GOP Congressman Endorses Bogus Theory That Syria Got Its Chemical Weapons From Saddam

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Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Center for Public Integrity website.

US District Judge Roger Vinson, who signed an order requiring Verizon to give the National Security Agency telephone records for tens of millions of American customers, attended an expenses-paid judicial seminar sponsored by a libertarian think tank that featured lectures from a vocal proponent of executive branch powers.

More on the NSA’s electronic surveillance program.


NSA Spying: An Obama Scandal?


The Domestic Surveillance Boom, From Bush to Obama


Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance


Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar


What Is the NSA Doing With All Those Phone Records?

Vinson, whose term on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began in 2006 and expired last month, was the only member of the special court to attend the August 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, according to disclosure records filed by the federal judge.

The Center for Public Integrity collected the disclosure records as part of an investigative report that revealed how large corporations and conservative foundations routinely sponsor ideologically driven educational conferences for state and federal judges.

It’s unclear which lectures Vinson attended during the “Terrorism, Civil Liberty, & National Security” seminar. FREE’s website only provides a general agenda for the program and no lecture transcripts.

But Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor who delivered two lectures, argued in a 2007 book he co-wrote — Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts—that “the executive branch, not Congress or the judicial branch, should make the tradeoff between security and liberty.”

The book also asserts that while “no one doubts that injustices occur during emergencies, the type of judicial scrutiny that would be needed to prevent the injustices that have occurred during American history would cause more harm than good by interfering with justified executive actions.”

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Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

Mother Jones

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Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series’ fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of Internet traffic in North America. It’s a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website.

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi‘s mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development‘s Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. “The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues,” says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. “To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work.”

There’s something else the show handled so well that’s often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has ever been broadcast on television.

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

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VIDEO: 97% of Climate Scientists Can’t Be Wrong

The biggest survey of climate research to date finds that scientists are more united than ever. Telling Americans that scientists don’t agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It’s been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: ”you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” Oh yeah, and avoid truth: “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” It seems to have worked: only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study. That “consensus gap”, as it’s known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous. A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook’s website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the some 4000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it’s caused by humans. His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2000 journals across two decades. ”People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy,” he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look, ”like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here.” Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: ”All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent.” View post:  VIDEO: 97% of Climate Scientists Can’t Be Wrong ; ;Related ArticlesIt Doesn’t Matter If We Never Run Out of Oil: We Won’t Want to Burn It AnymoreOne Family’s Great EscapeWe Just Passed the Climate’s “Grim Milestone” ;

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VIDEO: 97% of Climate Scientists Can’t Be Wrong

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8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

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“Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful.”—Former President George W. Bush, July 2012

On Thursday, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum will be officially dedicated at Southern Methodist University, a school attended by the likes of former first lady Laura Bush, actor Powers Boothe, and Kourtney Kardashian. The invitation-only event will be attended by President Obama, before he visits a memorial at Baylor University for victims of the West, Texas, plant explosion. A spokesperson says attendance at the library dedication is expected to be in the thousands.

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8 Things You Won’t See at the George W. Bush Presidential Library

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America Is Filling Empty Battlefields

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000—and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power. He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world… for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.” In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged. It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

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America Is Filling Empty Battlefields

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And the Most Outrageous Neocon Iraq War Anniversary Remark Is…

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The past week has brought about a ten-years-after review of the Iraq war—particularly an examination of how the Bush-Cheney administration sold the war prior to the invasion launched on March 19, 2003. Pundits and politicians have relived those days—and somberly reconsidered the run-up to the war, the role of the media in enabling the swindle, and the consequences of that military action. MSNBC has aired a documentary based on the book I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Showtime featured a documentary on Dick Cheney that centered on the war. The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University released a study noting that the war cost US taxpayers $2.2 trillion and consumed the lives of 4,488 members of the US armed services and at least 123,000 to 134,000 Iraqi civilians.

One of the most shocking reactions to the anniversary came—perhaps no surprise—from one of the leading neoconservative drum majors for the war, Richard Perle. As a member of the Defense Policy Board advisory committee, Perle, who had been a hawk’s-hawk assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan years, began calling for war in Iraq nanoseconds after September 11. He told CNN, “Even if we cannot prove to the standard that we enjoy in our own civil society they are involved, we do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden. That can be documented.” In 2002, he suggested a war against Iraq would be a cakewalk: “It isn’t going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either.” He asserted Saddam was “working feverishly to acquire nuclear weapons.” He claimed the post-invasion reconstruction in Iraq would be self-financing. He got everything wrong.

On Wednesday morning, NPR’s Renee Montagne interviewed Perle. It wasn’t a grilling. Perle was allowed to explain his Iraq war fever, noting that “we had intelligence assessments” indicating Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He pleaded his case by remarking that after 9/11, “You ask yourself what could happen next, you do the obvious thing….The Bush administration made a list of potential threats and on that list the single most important potential threat was another attack with a weapon of mass destruction. So then you make a list of who has weapons of mass destruction and who might be motivated either to attack or enable someone else to attack the US. And Iraq was clearly on that list.” Perle then off-handedly observed, “It’s easy a decade later to say, well, it turned out this fact or that presumption was wrong.” He insisted that the biggest “blunder” with Iraq was the post-invasion occupation.

This is all standard fare for a neocon who won’t let go. But the final exchange of the interview was a chilling driveway moment:

Montagne: Ten years later, nearly 5000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

Perle: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done with the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say we shouldn’t have done that.

That was cold. In the Showtime documentary, Cheney predictably expresses no regrets, saying, “I did what I did. It’s all on the public record, and I feel very good about it. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it in a minute.” Yet here is Perle going beyond no-regrets to deny it is even worthwhile to consider the human costs of the war when assessing the decision to invade Iraq. His comment is modern-day Strangelove and yet another reason he deserves the nickname he earned in the 1980s: the Prince of Darkness. What transpires within Perle’s soul, ultimately, is not all that important. The true tragedy is that anyone would seek—let alone heed—the advice of a man so averse to considering a basic (and moral) calculation.

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And the Most Outrageous Neocon Iraq War Anniversary Remark Is…

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