Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Ultimate No-Fly List - Leaking War
from Tom Engelhardt's intro to Peter Van Buren's "Leaking War"
Last week, touching down in India on his way to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described reality as you seldom hear it in the confines of Washington and, while he was at it, put his stamp of approval on a new global doctrine for the United States. Panetta is, of course, the man who, as director of the CIA, once called its drone air campaign in the Pakistani borderlands the only game in town. (At the time, as now, it was a classified, covert set of air strikes that were a secret to no one in Washington, Islamabad, or anywhere else on Earth.)
In India, expressing his frustration over U.S. relations with Pakistan, he spoke the W-word aloud for the first time. We are, he told his Indian hosts, fighting a war in the FATA [the Pakistani tribal areas]. How true. Washington has indeed long been involved in a complex, confusing, escalating, and undoubtedly self-defeating partial war with Pakistan, never until now officially called by that name, even as the intensity of the drone air campaign in that countrys borderlands continues to ratchet up. So give Panetta credit for rare bluntness.
snip
Leaking War
White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.
The issue of whether the White House leaked information to support the presidents reelection while crushing whistleblower leaks it disfavors shouldnt be seen as just another OReilly v. Maddow sporting event. What lies at the nexus of Obamas targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.
Read all at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/