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What is Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA Deputy Director of Operations who ordered the destruction of the interrogation tapes of two al Qaeda members, doing now? According to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s, he’s in business with one of the brothers of Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Moreover, says Silverstein, Rodriguez is very close friends with Reyes, who praised him at his retirement by saying Rodriguez was “was really the genesis” of 24.

UPDATE: Ken Silverstein has retracted the most important part of this:

A Reyes staffer has told me that the story “is absolute fiction” and that Rodriguez has never had any discussions about doing business with any member of Reyes’s family. “There’s absolutely no truth to” the story, the staffer said. He said Reyes’s planned a “rigorous inquiry” into the destruction of the videotapes and that, “We are going to follow the facts wherever they may lead.”

I have retraced my steps in reporting the story and it’s clear that what I wrote was wrong…I regret the error and apologize for it.

For what it’s worth, the part about Reyes comparing Rodriguez to Jack Bauer is right.

Robert Parry’s Consortium News is starting a $50,000 fundraiser. Parry is one of the greatest investigative journalists in the United States, and I encourage you to check them out and consider donating.

Parry explains the need for the fundraiser and Consortium News generally here. There are so many possibilities now to fund and create better media ourselves that it’s a self-indulgent waste of time to complain about the corporate media. (Certainly few people are more guilty of this than me. Indeed, if complaining about the corporate media is a crime, then I’m getting the death penalty. But as of today, I resolve to do better.)

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The Zero-Sum Fiasco
Bush in a Humiliating Zero-Sum Iranian Game of His Own Making
By Dilip Hiro

Bush’s woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United States treasury, but reduced Washington’s standing in the Middle East in a way not yet fully grasped by most commentators. Whereas Washington once played off Tehran against Baghdad, while involved in a superpower zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, the Bush administration is now engaged in a zero-sum game, as a virtual equal, with Iran. That is, America’s loss has become Iran’s automatic gain, and vice-versa.

To grasp the steepness of Washington’s recent fall, recall that until Saddam Hussein’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the zero-sum doctrine in the region applied only to Iraq and Iran, two minor powers on the world stage.

The rest.

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Tomdispatch: So, take us on a little tour of our world in terms of nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Schell: The way I think of it, in the Cold War, the nuclear age was in a sort of adolescence. Just a two-power or, at most, a five- or six-sided affair. Now, it’s in its prime. We already have nine nuclear powers, with lots of aspirers to the club waiting in the wings. The nuclear weapon is fulfilling its destiny, which was known from the very beginning of the nuclear age: to be available to all who wanted it, whether or not they choose to actually build the thing.

In a certain sense, we’re just beginning to face the nuclear danger in its inescapable, quintessential form. At key moments in the nuclear age, the public has suddenly gotten very worked up about its peril. Now, if I am not mistaken, could be another such moment. Everybody who has ever marched or spoken up against nuclear weapons should dust off their hiking boots and get back in the fray.

The rest.

Arthur Silber throws some useful cold water in everyone’s face:

Let us start with the most crucial point. The reaction from all quarters to the NIE relies on several interrelated central assumptions, ones that are regarded as so unquestionably true that no one thinks they need to be stated: that major policy decisions, including decisions of war and peace, are based on intelligence in the first place; that a decision to go to war is one made only after cool and careful rational deliberation; and that nations go to war for the reasons they announce to the world.

ALL OF THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, UNEQUIVOCALLY FALSE.

Read it all.

I agree mostly, but not completely, with Arthur’s take. Certainly the new NIE changes nothing about the bipartisan policy that we must run the middle east, which in turns means we must crush Iran. However, it may change the cost/benefit ratio perceived by our sane evil leaders about how we go about the crushing. It also strengthens the hand of our sane evil leaders vis a vis their insane evil rivals. Strangling and subversion may become more likely and direct military assault less so.