THIS MODERN WORLD

According to a new Seymour Hersh article, the Bush administration has ramped up covert action inside Iran, and has notified the congressional leadership that it’s planing to spend up to $400 million on it. Thanks, Democratic-controlled Congress!

But the most important part of the piece is this:

But a lesson was learned in the incident [in January when tiny Iranian boats sailed near US battleships]: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Recall that the Bush administration also made plans to create a pretext for war with Iraq if the WMD stuff didn’t work out. This is from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

DB/Anabasis was the code name for an extensive covert operations plan that had been drawn up by the CIA to destabilize and ultimately topple the regime of Saddam Hussein…

Over an intense forty-five day period beginning in late 2001, [two CIA operatives] cooked up an audacious plan…

Anabasis was no-holds-barred covert action. It called for installing a small army of paramilitary CIA officers on the ground inside Iraq; for elaborate schemes to penetrate Saddam’s regime; recruiting disgruntled military officers with buckets of cash; for feeing the regime disformation…for disrupting the regime’s finances…for sabotage that included blowing up railroad lines…It also envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by U.S. fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war.

On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees—including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat—were briefed.

“The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out” [said CIA operative John McGuire]. If all went as planned, “you’d have a premise for war: we’ve been invited in.”

Yikes:

The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist Mark Serreze.

It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen last autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said…

“Five years ago, to think that we’d even be talking about the possibility of the North Pole melting out in the summer, I would have never thought it,” he said…

“If you talked to me or other scientists just a few years ago, we were saying that we might lose all or most of the summer sea ice cover by anywhere from 2050 to 2100,” Serreze said. “Then, recently, we kind of revised those estimates, maybe as early as 2030. Now, there’s people out there saying it might be even before that. So, things are happening pretty quick up there.”

Here’s some good work on the same general subject by Free Love Forum. The fossil fuel industry may have all the money, but we have all the talented sketch comedy artists.

You have to feel for Vic Svec. He’s a senior vice president at Peabody Energy, the largest private coal producer on earth, and it’s apparently his job to be wheeled out whenever there’s any threat of action on global warming. After James Hansen’s recent Senate testimony, Svec sent this statement to the New York Times:

Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If [Hansen] would imprison those who don’t march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the Czech Republic, a former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.

Here’s John Coleman, the “former” founder of the Weather Channel, giving his fascinating views on climate change:

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide…I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

Here’s how I imagine the meeting went as Vic Svec huddled with his staff to draft the New York Times statement:

SVEC: We need three names on our side.

LACKEY: We’ve got Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic.

SVEC: Great. Just make sure he doesn’t start talking about the dangers of “homosexualism.”

LACKEY: And then there’s Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace guy.

SVEC: Didn’t Moore just say we have to stop using fossil fuels due to the threat of global warming? And that “coal causes the worst health impacts of anything we are doing today”?

LACKEY: Eh, who cares. No one will notice except the losers who fuck around on blogs.

SVEC: Ha! Got that right. And who’s number three?

MINION: Um…

LACKEY: Yeah, that’s the thing. We’re having trouble getting to three.

SVEC: What about Charles Manson? Our focus groups just remember his name, not why they remember it.

MINION: He doesn’t want to be associated with us anymore. Says it hurts his credibility.

SVEC: How about that monkey we’d been training to talk?

LACKEY: He won’t do it either. He told the trainer he felt like we’re insulting his intelligence.

SVEC: Shit. Don’t tell me we’re going to have to go with that Weather Channel moron.

[long pause]

SVEC: Son of a bitch. All right, let’s saddle up.

MINION: One last thing, just looking at the text—how can people be “former” founders of Greenpeace and the Weather Channel?

SVEC: Jesus Christ, do I have to teach you people everything? You obviously don’t understand the first thing about SCIENCE!

Remember when John McCain admitted that he’s computer “illiterate“? Now his tech guys are trying to defend the fact that their candidate isn’t familiar with the most culturally significant communications medium in our lifetimes :

Pressed again on McCain’s tech savvy, he defends his candidate.

“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” he says.

“You actually do,” former Edwards blogger Tracy Russo responds, suggesting he try to explain Twitter to his grandmother and then ask her how that applies to governing.

“John McCain is aware of the Internet,” says Soohoo. “This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues.”

The fact that McCain would consider the internet one of a range of “issues” is hilariously out of touch. That’s like bragging that Richard Nixon was familiar with the television “issue” in 1960 or that FDR’s fireside chats were panders on the radio “issue”. I don’t expect John McCain to start his own blog or have a personal Facebook account, but a lack of experience with a communications medium this ubiquitous is pretty revealing. After eight years of a president with zero intellectual curiosity, I find it astonishing that we have a prospective leader who wouldn’t want to get a little hands-on time with what has amounted to a communications revolution. I know if I was alive a hundred years ago and everyone around me was gushing about this new-fangled invention called the telephone, I’d probably put down the telegraph needle and give it a shot.

In other words, the medium really is the message in this case, and John McCain doesn’t seem to be interested in either.

… and a small shout-out to my late mom, if you’ll excuse a point of personal privilege. Carlin was probably too liberal, and certainly too profane, for her tastes. But he was so damned funny that she bought all his albums anyway, and always made a point of sharing them with her eleven year old son. Thanks for that, mom.