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Jane Mayer's expose in the The New Yorker explains how the U.S. is conducting a secret war in Pakistan using unmanned Predator drones. Americans have largely come to accept the Predator drone strikes as necessary but PBS' Tavis Smiley warned the attacks could turn futures generations against the U.S. "Killing is killing and somebody ought to say that," Smiley said Sunday on NBC.

Balloon Juice: From the sh*t you already knew department.  Who knows, someone in authority may even be moved to uphold the law!

field negro: Another unabashed Republican racist

DownWithTyranny! Confidential to banksters...

PoliGazette: Obama strikes the right tone on Africa

Informed Comment: Afghanistan/Pakistan death and displaced persons update

BAGnewsNotes: Because Chris Hondros, having made twelve trips to Iraq in covering the war, is one of America's most respected and highly praised photojournalists, BNN is pleased to offer this review of "The Hurt Locker."

The New Yorker has a great profile of Sheila Bair, the populist Republican who's at the helm of the FDIC. (h/t Riverdaughter)

As you may already know, Bair is not well liked by the Wall St. crowd that's running the White House show. (Apparently she has this bizarre idea that her job is to look out for working folk. Crazy talk!) Well, she's very popular with regular people - the administration wouldn't get rid of her, it would make a stink. Instead, they've just neutered her:

These debates entered into the Administration’s discussions about building a new regulatory architecture. In late March, Geithner previewed for Congress some of the key concepts that Treasury wanted. The outline seemed to match the Bair camp’s ideas. [Ladies, has this ever happened to you?] A new authority with the power to take over large financial institutions that posed a systemic risk to the economy was modeled on the F.D.I.C., which, Geithner suggested in his testimony, would be an equal partner with Treasury in resolving such firms if they failed. He seemed to be saying that although he and Bair may have disagreed about how to handle the current crisis, there was much more consensus about how to deal with a future one.

But in the white paper detailing the new legislation, which the Administration released on June 17th, all the new authority to regulate firms that posed systemic risk was vested in the Federal Reserve. During Geithner’s testimony before the Senate, Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, echoing Bair, was incredulous. “It took fourteen years for the Fed to write one regulation on mortgages after we gave it the power to do that,” he said. “What makes you think that the Fed will do better this time around?” In addition, while the March plan said that the “Secretary and the FDIC would decide” how to resolve a failing firm, the new plan said such power should “be vested in Treasury.” Geithner could appoint the F.D.I.C. to do the technical work of cleaning up the firm, but between late March and mid-June — when Bair’s aggressive ideas about how to handle Citigroup leaked to the press — Bair’s agency had been downgraded from Treasury’s equal partner to a sidekick.

The senior Treasury official said that stripping authority from the F.D.I.C. had nothing to do with pressure from the banks. “Making a group decision on something that must be done really quickly is not easy,” he said. “At the end of the day, someone has to have the ability to make a call, and it’s better to have that authority vested in one person.”

When I asked Bair about the plan, she said, “I think it reflected a lot of input from a lot of different agencies, and the private sector, and insurance and consumer groups. It’s a very difficult task to try to balance all the different perspectives and come up with a package, and every compromise is going to have people who are unhappy about various parts of it. So I think it’s a starting point.” I said that she sounded disappointed. “I don’t know if ‘disappointed’ is the right word,” she replied.

I'd love to tell you that I'm so erudite and cosmopolitan that I eagerly gobble up The New Yorker cover to cover every month. But it would be a lie. The honest truth is that I read The New Yorker occasionally when articles come up through keyword searches for research for the site and when other bloggers I respect recommend an article.

But this article on Leon Panetta at the CIA was sent to me by one of my Iranian friends (living abroad) who has been filling my inbox with reports of protests and the rumors flying around Tehran. This article has filled her with dread of American interference in Iran.

In fairness, it's a reasonably balanced article; it fairly states the delicate balance that Panetta must tread between the all-too-often opposing forces in the Agency and the Executive Branch. But this section, buried deep on page 6 of the 8 page article, hit me (like my friend) right in the gut:

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide. A third prisoner died after an interrogation in which a C.I.A. officer participated, though the officer evidently did not cause the death. (Several other detainees have disappeared and remain unaccounted for, according to Human Rights Watch.)

During his tenure at the C.I.A., John Helgerson, the former inspector general, forwarded the crucifixion case, along with an estimated half-dozen other incidents, to the Justice Department, for possible prosecution. But the case files have languished. An official familiar with the cases told me that the agency has deflected inquiries by the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking information about any internal disciplinary action. (Helgerson told me, “Some individuals have been disciplined. And others no longer work at the agency.”)

Panetta acknowledges that there are some people still at the C.I.A. who may be tainted by the torture program. Nevertheless, he says, “I really respect the people who say we shouldn’t have gotten involved in the interrogation business but we had to do our jobs. I don’t think I should penalize people who were doing their duty. If you have a President who exercises bad judgment, the C.I.A. pays the price.”

Excuse me? We're literally crucifying detainees (who have not had the right to even know what they're charged with, much less any other legal right) and there's been NO accountability, NO investigation and Panetta's worried about the CIA paying the price?

Methinks they have the wrong priorities.

Although I normally take everything the CIA says with a very large grain of salt, I just don't think Leon Panetta's all that far from the truth. I think Dick Cheney would rather be right than see the country safe from harm:

WASHINGTON -- CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's approach to terrorism almost suggests "he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney "smells some blood in the water" on the issue of national security.

Cheney has said in several interviews that he thinks Obama is making the U.S. less safe. He has been critical of Obama for ordering the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, halting enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists and reversing other Bush administration initiatives he says helped to prevent attacks on the U.S.

Last month the former vice president offered a withering critique of Obama's policies and a defense of the Bush administration on the same day that Obama made a major speech about national security.

Panetta said of Cheney's remarks: "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

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Vanity Fair:

We had our own presidential campaign cover in the works, which explored a different facet of the Politics of Fear, but we shelved it when The New Yorker’s became the “It Girl” of the blogosphere. Now, however, in a selfless act of solidarity with our downstairs neighbors here at the Condé Nast building, we’d like to share it with you. Confidentially, of course.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer political cartoonist David Horsey put together his own parody, as has blogger Jeremy Glass.

Nice going New Yorker. We have a very large number of people who actually believe all the smears that have floated around about Obama during this election season. So what does The New Yorker decide to do? Put them all together in a cover, as a satire, to sell copies for a very serious article. I think that the cover will only be used to further enhance those fallacies. How would the right react with a NYer graphic of McCain screaming at his first wife while she signs the divorce papers---one arm is behind his back---he's handing Cindy a box of chocolate candies as she kicks over a bag full of cash that's marked Beer money while a Keating jet is parked outside the window. Well those are mostly true...

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Atrios says:

The New Yorker cover could have worked if had made more clear who it was satirizing (Fox news, the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh, whatever), or by being clever enough to provide the actual funny. As it is it's just a reflection of the Right's view of Obama, but there's nothing clever or funny about it. The cartoon could run as is on the cover of the National Review, also meaning to be "funny" but with a different target.

All of this doesn't make the New Yorker public enemy #1, just makes them idiots of the week....and the Doughy Pantload says:

What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it's almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review.

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton:

"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

HuffPo:

Artist Barry Blitt defends the cover, saying that "It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is."

Kurtz's Reliable Sources touched on the graphic for a few minutes.

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Seymour Hersh has been writing about the Bush administration's aggressive stance against Iran for years now.  His latest article for The New Yorker, "Preparing the Battlefield", Hersh claims that the Bush administration has been carrying out clandestine operations in Iran for some time now, with the funding and cooperation of the Democratic leadership in Congress. 

HERSH:  I think this is another example of putting an awful lot of pressure on the Iranian government. There's been a dramatic increase in kinetic events and chaos inside of Iran. Almost every other day, there's another story in the Iranian press -- I write about this in the article, too -- about things blowing up, et cetera, et cetera. It looks like things are falling apart, a little bit. And the central government certainly has more trouble.

And I think the goal of this operation, this incredible operation, with all this money -- and, by the way, it's the Democrats in Congress who basically looked the other way and said, take the money and run. They did not stop this money, the leadership that I'm talking about, the Democratic leadership.

So, basically, my guess is that -- I don't think we can safely say that any military action is off the table, no matter what happens. And that's -- as I say, I wish I'm going to be wrong about all that, but this is really, sort of, an amazing development.

CROWLEY: Absolutely. I want to read a graph out of your book because it goes to the oversight of the Democrats you just mentioned. [snip] "'The oversight process has not kept pace -- it's been co-opted by the administration,' the person familiar with the contents of the findings said. 'The process is broken and this is dangerous stuff we're authorizing.'"

Tell me, first, what your sources say is so dangerous about this?

HERSH: The president has to give a finding on covert action, any action that's covert. In other words, when CIA goes in some place, if they get caught, there could be spies.

So he has to tell the Congress about it. And the military simply is -- the president, since 9/11, has decided anything we do militarily, we don't have to tell anybody in Congress about.

Guest host Candy Crowley brings on Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker to officially deny that any cross border operations have taken place, but Hersh points out that Crocker may not be in the loop--plausible deniability being the operative word.

That is simply a reality, that when you run secret operations, if you're not telling the commander, the military commander of the Central Command, who is supposedly running the country -- you may not tell the ambassador everything. Sometimes it's better not to have the ambassador know. 

Full transcripts below the fold:

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