THE CORRUPTION CONTINUES

"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer."
~ John F. Kennedy.

Sibel Edmonds has an opinion piece just out about the Jane Harman/AIPAC/Israeli spies scandal which I first mentioned in this post. There's an update on Hypocrite Harman's weekend activities at Glenn Greenwald's blog:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of the most shameless and absurd spectacles to appear in Washington in some time: the self-righteous, self-obsessed rage expressed by Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) -- leading defender of Bush's illegal domestic eavesdropping programs -- upon learning that one of her conversations had been legally eavesdropped upon as part of a criminal investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli agent. Over the weekend, Harman (along with half of the U.S. Congress) appeared at the AIPAC conference and continued her new anti-eavesdropping crusade, actually vowing to lead an investigation into potential eavesdropping abuses to assure that it would never happen again. Atrios notes just some of the points that makes her behavior incomparably shameless.

What would have been the result if Hypocrite Harman's Israeli agent had been able to lean on Nancy Pelosi in order to get Pelosi to name Harman as head of the House Intelligence Committee? How about this:

Just imagine if Harman had obtained either senior intelligence position that she sought. She would have had access to every sort of top secret intelligence possessed by the US government and would have been in a good position to influence policy. From the Israeli perspective, she would have been their spy, a highly placed agent of influence who could also provide every bit of sensitive intelligence in the CIA cupboard.

Now this story has gone basically nowhere in the bullshit American media. Kind of like how the espionage trial of AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman has gone nowhere in the bullshit American justice system. And, now that I think about it, that's exactly how the Turkish bribery scandal of Dennis Hastert went--nowhere. But Hastert did have a happy ending since he's now an official lobbyist for the Ankara regime, with a contract valued at $35,000 per month for Hastert to secure Turkey's interests in the US Congress.

If there were such a thing as justice, the Congressional criminals like Hastert and Harman would get their comeuppance in a court of law. Their shame would be front page news and the first story up on the evening news. But those of us familiar with Susurluk know that there is no justice and the criminals always move on to greener pastures.

It would appear that I'm not the only one who thinks this way because the deliberate downplay of these kinds of scandals in the bullshit American media and the lack of any kind of dispensation of justice from the bullshit American legal system and the protection of criminals in high office is what, it seems to me, bothers Sibel Edmonds, too. And make no mistake about it, this whole rotten System is a bipartisan effort.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman (D-CA) by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in the integrity of Congress. But the story is almost dead - ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media's insistence on burying 'real' issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation's continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the 'thank you' should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late Congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan isle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party's tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the 'victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping' card, the same very 'evil doing' they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets. They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without the apparent need for much arm twisting...

[ . . . ]

How does it work? How do these people escape the consequences of accountability? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against Congressional representatives, as if the days of J. Edgar Hoover were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when Congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of Congress watch out for each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this 'all for one, one for all' kind of solidarity in Congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

[ . . . ]

Despite a certain degree of exposure, cases such as Harman's and Hastert's, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end. Criminal conduct, by powerful foreign entities, against our national interest, is given a pass, as was recently proven by the abandonment of the AIPAC spy case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media seem now to have been almost universally accepted as a fact of life.

Read the whole thing here and prepare to be disgusted.

For more disgust, take a look at a recent post on Zerkesorg, which outlines the Ankara regime's efforts to remove the wildly popular Osman Baydemir from his mayoral seat. A sample, from the MGK meeting in January 2006--months before the Amed Serhildan:

Commanders of the armed forces request that Mayor of Diyarbakir [Amed] be removed from his post:

All units of government must show their decisiveness about terrorism. We have two expectations. The first one is that the mayor of Diyarbakir is committing a crime. Conditions for his removal [Mr. Baydemir][from his post] by the Ministry of Internal Affairs have ripened. This request is not out of legal norms. If tolerance continues, the terrorist organization will bring its activities all the way to the cities. Our second expectation is that the village guards [korucular] are targets of sympathizers of the terrorist organization; we benefit from their contribution to the security forces. There are two problems regarding these issues. First: we cannot make up for the loss of village guards. We want the declaration and action plan of 2000 to be reviewed. The second [problem regarding village guards] is with softening down the volunteered village guard system.

Azadîxwaz has a translation of something from columnist Etyen Mahçupyan on trusting the Turkish state . . . or not:

The ones who are talking about PKK’s disarmament are acting as if they are not aware of the history of the Republic of Turkey in the minds/memories of the Kurds. PKK could seriously lay down the arms, and they could genuinely want this, too… But it will not lay down arms as far as possible, because the Kurdish society does not trust the state. There is no guarantee that a more tyrannical regime will not be imposed upon the Kurds under the disguise of politicization of the PKK and there isn’t any state authority that can guarantee this. Because history has proven that these kinds of guarantees are (never) executed.

[ . . . ]

Nowadays, you could explain to the Kurds what a “right” decision it would be if the PKK laid down the arms. As a matter of fact that is how they think, too. They know that peace can only be achieved in an environment where there are no weapons. But they also know the history of this region and they don’t trust the state. That is issue…

Not only regarding disarmament, but this is exactly the same kind of argument that goes through my head whenever I hear someone talk about the "repentance" law or the granting of a general amnesty. What in the hell do those things really mean and why should we trust such schemes?

Something to keep an eye on . . . earlier today the news broke in English-language media that 44 people had been killed during a wedding in Mardin province. You can get the basic rundown from The Times. Early reports have mentioned that this attack might be the result of a blood feud between korucu families. However, the gunmen were described as masked and armed with "assault rifles" and grenades. Certainly it could be the result of a blood feud gone very bad but it's also highly possible that it's a state operation, since the Ankara regime has specialized for decades in the massacre of unarmed civilians.