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Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA recruited and trained a small number of Guantanamo Bay detainees as double agents, according to an Associated Press report published on Tuesday. The program was run out of a clandestine facility near the military prison, and—according to US officials—was useful in gathering intel for targeting and killing Al Qaeda leaders. (CIA officers would typically meet with double agents in Afghanistan.)
“Jail time at Guantanamo is a new asset on the résumés of many double agents, security officials say—an ultimate sign of credibility that often makes them revered and trusted among senior operatives,” another AP story, from 2010, reads.
In 2009, President Obama ordered a review of the double agents recruited during the Gitmo program because the agents provided intel used in drone-strike operations, according to one of the officials interviewed. But perhaps the most attention-grabbing part of the AP‘s new investigation is that the CIA’s old double-agent facility was nicknamed after a Beatles song.
Here’s the relevant text from the AP (emphasis mine):
The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.
The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.
But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.
It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.
Paul McCartney, the principal songwriter for “Penny Lane,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how he felt about this.
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The CIA Trained Gitmo Detainees as Double Agents at a Secret Facility Named After a Beatles Song
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Austin Frakt draws my attention to a new Gallup poll with this tweet: “Consistent with my hypothesis that people think their care is good/efficient, others is bad/wasteful.” Here’s the poll:
I’d draw a different conclusion. For starters, keep in mind that public sentiment on this question hasn’t changed much over the past decade. There are some ups and downs in recent years about the quality of national health care coverage, possibly based on the ups and downs of Obamacare, but it mostly looks like noise to me.
More importantly, though, I don’t interpret this as a belief that coverage for other people is either bad or wasteful. I interpret it as a surprisingly accurate assessment of U.S. health care. About two-thirds of Americans have either Medicare or company-provided health care (or something similar), and they correctly tell Gallup that their own personal coverage is pretty good. And it is! At the same time, most people also think that overall health care coverage in America is pretty mediocre, and that’s true too. How can you call national coverage good or excellent when 50 million people are uninsured and have crappy access to medical care?
If Gallup had called me, this is precisely the response I would have given them. My own personal coverage is quite good. Thanks, MoJo! However, I’d also say that overall coverage in the U.S. is terrible. Obamacare will, perhaps, upgrade that to merely unsatisfactory, but that’s about it.
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Americans Are Surprisingly Clear-Eyed About American Health Care
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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.
Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another—even if there can be no 100% certitude about the origin of each one—the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people—in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate—can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.
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Why Institutional Divestment Might Be One of Our Best Tools For Fighting Climate Change
Mother Jones
Personally, I’ve never really understood the appeal of Mike Allen’s “Playbook”—or any of the other morning briefing newsletters. Why would reporters deliberately read something whose explicit goal is to make sure that everyone is saying and chasing the same stories? This has never made any sense to me.
That’s not really the topic of this post, though. I just wanted to get it off my chest as a prelude to the latest example of the press going into full stonewall mode whenever they’re the ones a story is about. Today, Erik Wemple reported the results of a deep dive into the contents of Playbook, and it wasn’t pretty: organizations that advertise with Allen, such as the Chamber of Commerce, get an awful lot of friendly mentions that are presented as straight news. Does Allen do this as part of his deal with his advertisers without telling his readers, or is there a more innocent explanation? We’ll never know:
Politico’s leaders didn’t cooperate for this piece. In rejecting a sit-down discussion, Editor-in-Chief John Harris said the premise “is without merit in any shape or form.” Without an interview, it’s impossible to judge Allen’s motivations. For example, does he write nice things about the chamber because he wants more advertisers or because he feels their agenda doesn’t get fair play in other outlets? Did he publish those BP plugs because he thought they were newsworthy or because he’s got a friend at the company?
Of course Harris refused to say anything. It’s standard journalistic practice. It’s only other people who have to answer questions. It’s outrageous to expect news organizations themselves to do the same.
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The Media Once Again Refuses to Answer Questions From the Media
A rural cooperative is about to cook up Iowa’s biggest solar array — in the aptly named community of Frytown.
The local board of supervisors recently rezoned nine acres of land owned by the Farmers Electric Co-op, which is planning to build a 500-kilowatt array at the site. Co-op officials say construction could be finished by March, meeting 15 percent of the power needs of its 600 members in eastern Iowa.
“It keeps our money local,” said Warren McKenna, the co-op’s general manager, according to The Daily Iowan. “We’re not sending our money up to the larger companies. [It] saves everybody money.” Johnson County planning and zoning official RJ Moore said the solar farm would be the only one of its kind in the state.
Pushing the renewables envelope isn’t new for the co-op, as The Iowa City Press-Citizen reports:
Founded in 1916, Farmers Electric Co-op has been investing in solar power since 2008 when the cooperative installed solar arrays at Township Elementary and Iowa Mennonite School for renewable energy and educational opportunities. A third array is planned for Pathway Christian School near Kalona as well.
Next came the solar garden, which allows residents to purchase solar panels — at a reduced cost — in the cooperative’s growing solar array behind the company’s main building. The value of power generated on the panels is then deducted from the customer’s electric bill.
Maria Urice, a consultant who helps coordinate and market the cooperative’s renewable and energy efficiency efforts, said the solar garden was an immediate success.
“We offered 20 (panels) and they were sold out in less than a week,” she said. “We ended up tripling the offer.”
Another initiative allows residents to purchase and install site arrays near their businesses, farms or homes. Again, the power generated replaces electricity used on the property.
This isn’t the only happy energy news in the area. Facebook recently announced that a data center being built in Altoona, Iowa, 100 miles west of Frytown, will be powered entirely with wind energy.
Source
Johnson County’s Field of Beams, Iowa City Press-Citizen
Planned solar farm moves forward with sustainability plans, Daily Iowan
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Here’s an email from a reader in California with an interesting wrinkle on the rate shock debate:
I’m self employed, with individual health insurance coverage, and my family is one of those whose current health insurance policy is being canceled and whose premium will rise once we purchase insurance on the CA exchange. But it’s not as simple as that. We signed up for our current policy in November 2011 (therefore no grandfathering) and the premium was substantially lower than the policy we had prior to that. In hindsight, I’m guessing that the premium for that newly introduced plan was so low because the insurance company knew it would have to be canceled in 2014. So, they weren’t going to incur a lot of losses or have to make provisions for a long claims tail.
The premium for our new insurance, purchased from the exchange, is going to be about what our original (pre-2011) policy premiums would have been now, allowing for the usual annual premium increases. So, yes, we’re having to move from cheaper to more expensive insurance. On the other hand, it’s very likely that the cheaper policy would never have been available in the first place without the ACA’s 2014 deadline for such plans. Of course, the insurance company didn’t clarify back in 2011 that this policy had a limited lifespan and would have to be replaced in 2014 with a new one.
I wonder if this is at all common?
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In a bit of bad planning, it turns out that most of the final quilts in our 2013 quiltblogging extravaganza are Irish chain quilts. This one is a single chain made out of fabrics purchased in Sedona, which is why it’s cleverly named Sedona Chain. It’s a crib size quilt that’s machine pieced and hand quilted. I mistakenly thought it was lap sized, which is why I asked Marian to model it on her lap. But this nonetheless turned out to be a popular decision, and as soon as I put her down, Domino promptly curled up and took a nap.
In other cat news, meet Inspector Picklejuice, the newest member of the MoJo cat family. Inspector P belongs to Ivylise Simones, our new creative director. Welcome aboard to both.
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Let’s talk about Darrell Issa. He’s a Republican attack dog, and that’s fine. Every party has people like that. But Issa is now the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which means (in practice) that he’s the guy charged with harrying and annoying the Obama administration with maximum effectiveness. The problem is that he keeps misfiring. He has a habit of releasing partial transcripts that look incriminating but turn out to be nothingburgers once the full transcript comes out. He continues to press ludicrously overwrought theories that he simply can’t prove. Yesterday he got caught out once again when an administration witness flatly contradicted one of his latest wild charges. Steve Benen has the deets.
So here’s my question: Is Darrell Issa effective? My instinct is to say no: Republicans would be better off with someone who builds careful, methodical cases and scores some genuinely damaging points. But then, you’d expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? I’m the kind of person who appreciates careful and methodical cases.
Alternatively, the answer is that politics ain’t beanbag, and keeping up maximum pressure at all times is an opposition party’s best bet. If 99 percent of the mud you throw doesn’t stick, who cares? Shake it off and throw some more. Eventually you’ll find something damaging, and in the meantime all the mud really does have an effect. Low-information voters see a constant drip of spectacular charges and vaguely decide that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. They may not quite know what’s wrong, but it sure feels as if something is wrong.
So which is it? I can’t help but think that Issa really is hurting himself here by shredding his credibility on an almost daily basis. On the other hand, he’s been doing this stuff for three years now, and the press continues to eagerly lap up everything he says. No matter how many times he does it, they seem to be afraid that this time he might really have something, so they’d better play along.
I dunno. Issa’s ego is huge, but he’s no dummy. He obviously has reason to believe he can get away with this stuff forever. After all, during his Whitewater attack-dog days, Dan Burton pulled the same partial transcript trick that Issa loves, and it seemed to cause him no more than some momentary embarrassment. Maybe there really is method to his madness.
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Is Darrell Issa Becoming an Albatross to the Republican Party?
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