blowback

The series Homeland is now in its third season. Apparently the once flagship drama for Showtime, has hit the ratings skids this season, but not critically, and that remains troubling. This is an overtly, nakedly, proudly, racist bit of police state propaganda. That’s in no way hyperbole. The show never misses a chance to stigmatize the standard villains of the day (as if Dick Cheney, Bibi Netanyahu, and Eric Holder were script advisers), while valorizing and justifying torture, entrapment, illegal surveillance (I know, quaint idea), and racial profiling.

Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in solving the mystery: “why do [...]

The central defense of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks last year is that they shouldn’t be blamed for making so many inaccurate statements about it being a spontaneous protest against an insulting video rather than a premeditated terrorist attack because even the CIA talking points held that it was the former.

RT | May 10, 2013

A high court in Pakistan has ruled that US drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt should be considered war crimes, since the attacks resulted in the deaths of innocent people.
The Peshawar High Court has recommended the Pakistani government advance a resolution against the attacks in the United Nations. The court issued its verdict on the CIA-run air strikes in response to four petitions charging the attacks killed civilians and caused “collateral damage.”

It’s pretty clear at this point that the Obama administration explicitly misrepresented what they knew to be the truth about the September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins runs through the Obama administration’s reluctance to further intervene in Syria. There are many cons White House officials articulate, but here’s two that stood out to me.
Unintended Consequences

RT | May 7, 2013

Mississippi is still scheduled to execute a convicted murderer Tuesday despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and a new admission from the Department of Justice that the forensic investigation was severely flawed.

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | April 29, 2013

At the second annual Jerusalem Post Conference, held in New York City on Sunday April 28, a number of former and current Israeli officials offered new estimates about Iran’s nuclear progress, issued threats of war and pretended Israel is more powerful and militarily capable than it really is.

Libyan rebels gathered in Ajdabiya, March 2011. Credit: Al Jazeera English

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 [...]