kickin' back and listenin'

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You should join me. It's good for you.

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In case yer a glutton, I made a playlist of the Age of Manipulation presentation. Only ten hours....

It's also near the bottom of my sidebar. So if you want to leave it for a day when you decide to just stay in bed, it's down there waiting for you.

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The part of the Hersh lecture, so far, Tsarion would be most interested in is:

So, but in the Cheney shop — I can write about it in ways I could not then, because I didn't want expose anybody who was there — in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What's this? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD? And there's no democracy? Don't they get it? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude: "We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."

That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven — all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers — many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims in the 13th century. And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins, and they have insignia that reflect that, the whole notion that this is a war, it's culture war.

Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me, it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner von Braun. Werner Von Braun was the German rocket scientist who invented the V-2. And after WWII we had a secret program of bringing and sort of de-Nazifying some of the German scientists who were valuable to our own energy, our own missile program. And we brought him here — I think it was called PAPERCLIP, the secret program — and we brought him here to sort of recreate his life. You know, he was this nuclear... he was this scientist, he was a rocket scientist. So there was a wonderful satirist named Tom Lehrer — some of you old-timers might remember him, he wrote ditties. And one of his ditties about Werner von Braun was, oh yes, "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hit London." With his rockets. So the trouble with some of these religious groups is they may have good things, but right now there is a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.

Funny how old, sometimes entirely too level-headed, Sy Hersh confirms utterly stuff our supposed Out There specialists are all bleating about, ain't it?

Does it begin to give you any ideas?

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love, 99
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