Wikileaks Or Planted Leaks, Worm Or Head Of Snake, Close Enough?

Dana Milbank
Richard Cohen
David Brooks

"Guns, gold, vodka, showers of $100 bills, a Chechen rebel leader, a shady oil oligarch, and wedding guests on Jet Skis with bellies full of boiled sheep: This is diplomacy as it ought to be." - Dana Milbank

"This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community." - Hillary Clinton

 “The will of the people seems like it was manipulated by a well-funded campaign of hate, bigotry and xenophobia.”  - Imad Enchassi

Yes, Dana Milbank's opinion piece is as wonderful as his quote above, well worth reading. For those who haven't been able to link to Wikileaks web site over the past couple of days, it has been mysteriously jammed, perhaps by the intelligence service of some western democratic country, I really can't say and they won't either, nudge, nudge, wink, wink... You can, however, read the much edited versions on the NY Times website, which includes the entire missive from the Dagestan wedding. Supposedly, Wikileaks will only post the same ones that der Spiegal and the NY Times publish, then wait awhile before putting the whole 250,000 cable files on its site. So we currently have only what the editors believe are newsworthy and mildly embarrassing to the US State Dept. Already the spin is being put out how much better Obama's diplomats are than the Bushies, who tended to stomp and tromp on other people's toes... My brother-in-law sees all this as further proof that we are waning as a superpower, and that's the impotent frustration you hear as our empire falls...

Take the schizophrenic situation with North Korea. Everyone is freaking out because North K sent some ammo shells onto an island containing a military base and some more people got killed. The US implores china to do something, thinking that china is the only one who has enough clout to smack North K around a bit and get away with it. China, believing Obama when he earlier said he wanted to continue talks and negotiations, rushed around and got North K to agree to sit down and talk about stuff with itself, South K, Japan, and the US. To which we said are you freaking kidding? We won't sit down and talk with them!!! Along with freezing the pay of all federal employees, it looks like Obama is going all tea party on us... Time for Rahm to pay a visit and do some pragmatic yelling and cursing at Old Split Lip...

As the US and South K continue their war games in the water, provoking the North into more temper tantrums ( I wonder if that's how the royal family communicate with each other, and why there aren't many sit down, family dinners together...), maybe enough to escalate its bad behavior, enough to give the US, South K, and China the excuse to invade and end the madness once and for all...

Or not... Maybe there isn't a plan at all, and little communication among allies, and we are holding our collective breath, waiting to see what the rogue brat will do next. Maybe, we won't really know what's going on until the next batch of wikileaks files come out... or are the wikileaks files cleverly planted disinformation aimed at the Chinese because we would like them to support regime change in North K, and we would like all of the Arabian monarchs to support Israel's position towards Iran. It doesn't matter now if they said the things they have been quoted saying, the damage has been done. It's like asking someone that age-old question, when have you stopped beating your wife?

We haven't seemed to quite figure out what the Ill-Suns are up to, we don't have the handle to mess with their heads like we are doing with Iran. The wikileaks have shown them how much they are unloved, how their dreams of a Shia hegemony in the Middle East is resented by their Sunni neighbors, who were upset enough when the US, in effect, gave Iraq over to iran on a silver platter by letting Nuri al-Maliki form his governments. And now they seem to want the head of the snake cut off... And we are trying to please them, two important Iranian nuclear scientists were just assassinated in broad daylight, one who was their expert in fighting the Stuxnet worm. Worm, snake, isn't that close enough?

With this latest in-your-face action that the Israelis so dearly love, Iran is very very very pissed. Angry enough to take some kind of retaliation? Angry enough to stir up the hordes of Revolutionary guards and baton wielding basij and spill over their borders and take up the fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Or will it be content to bully around the Lebanese leader into accepting Iranian Revolutionary Guards into his military to act as liaisons with Hizbullah militants in the south? In the meantime, Iran says that it is all the US and Israel's fault, don't play into their taunts through wikileaks, we are all still brothers in the same faith, and order us a couple extra six-packs of Red Bull for the nuclear conference next week in Geneva, we need to recharge... all to an embarrassed yet thunderous silence throughout the Middle East...


I further wonder at the insanity that has become our system of justice. Sometimes agencies like the CIA and the FBI get something right, but usually they arrogantly ignore your human rights, and will lie, trick, and deceive you to commit a crime so they can lock you up and bring you to trial. Unless they shoot you instead. If you read books about the real CIA, it seems that they missed the intelligence boat on every major political event, from the fall of the Berlin Wall onwards...

Here is a troubling statement made to justify the scenario where the Somali-born teenage kid tries to kill a bunch of people lighting up a Christmas tree in Portland. They led this kid on for two years, feeding his fantasies of domestic jihad, even making a realistic car bomb for him, then saying they are justified doing this because: “So long as that person has expressed an interest in committing a crime, it’s appropriate for the government to respond by providing the purported means of carrying out that crime so as to make a criminal case against him.” Dudes, I've expressed an interest in getting rich, or just getting a job, or being able to feed my family this Christmas, and it looks like I'm not going to get a response from the government. Maybe we would all be better off, make more friends and get free money from the FBI if we stated a desire to all be jihadis or petty criminal master-minds...


I end with today's new bumper-sticker:

End all Bush tax-cuts

And let the IRS sort them out...