You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed. Or you could speak about the second administration in a row that wanted to leave no child behind, but was itself incapable of learning, or reasonably assessing its situation in the world.
Or you could simply wonder what's in Washington's water supply. Last week, after all, there was a perfect drone storm of a story, only a year or so late - and no, it wasn't that leaked "white paper" justifying the White House-directed assassination of an American citizen; and no, it wasn't the two secret Justice Department "legal" memos on the same subject that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were allowed to "view", but in such secrecy that they couldn't even ask John O Brennan, the president's counter-terrorism tsar and choice for CIA director, questions about them at his public nomination hearings; and no, it wasn't anything that Brennan, the man who oversaw the White House "kill list" and those presidentially chosen drone strikes, said at the hearings. And here's the most striking thing: it should have set everyone's teeth on edge, yet next to nobody even noticed.
Two weeks ago the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by "an informal arrangement" agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation. Full story...
Related posts:
Or you could simply wonder what's in Washington's water supply. Last week, after all, there was a perfect drone storm of a story, only a year or so late - and no, it wasn't that leaked "white paper" justifying the White House-directed assassination of an American citizen; and no, it wasn't the two secret Justice Department "legal" memos on the same subject that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were allowed to "view", but in such secrecy that they couldn't even ask John O Brennan, the president's counter-terrorism tsar and choice for CIA director, questions about them at his public nomination hearings; and no, it wasn't anything that Brennan, the man who oversaw the White House "kill list" and those presidentially chosen drone strikes, said at the hearings. And here's the most striking thing: it should have set everyone's teeth on edge, yet next to nobody even noticed.
Two weeks ago the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by "an informal arrangement" agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation. Full story...
Related posts:
- The United States has carried out more than 360 assassination drone attacks...
- Hey, hey, Barack! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?
- The children killed by America's drones.
- US drone attack massacres 21 people, injures 72 others in Somalia...
- Yemenis furious about US assassination drone strikes...
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