May 4, 2013

He didn't ratfuck Bush and Cheney. He whitewashed them.

And he's still at it. He blames their wars on Blackwater for example:

Jeremy Scahill blows the lid off "Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan"

http://my.firedoglake.com/jimwhite/2009/11/23/breaking-jeremy-scahill-blows-lid-off-blackwaters-secret-war-in-pakistan/

Scahill's first book is about Blackwater, not Bush or Cheney, and when he has to get personal he goes after Eric Prince, for moving to Abu Dhabi for example.

But he's been tearing into Obama relentlessly since before he was elected or had anything to do with drones. And Scahill can always be counted to make the point that Obama and Holder are worse than Bush and Cheney:

Video: Jeremy Scahill: Drone Killer Obama Is Out-Cheneying Cheney

http://www.qwmagazine.com/2012/06/04/video-jeremy-scahill-drone-killer-obama-is-out-cheneying-cheney/

And Scahill is but one beneficiary of the NYT "kill list" story that's been paying the bills for reliable ratfuckers everywhere for going on a year.

May 4, 2013

Scahill's a whiz when it comes to drones

but I think he's also a ratfucker, i.e. payrolled by undisclosed organizations hostile to the current administration. I came to that conclusion five years ago when Obama was running against Palin and McCain. Listen to one of Scahill's star turns on Democracy Now, another dubious enterprise, and he can't go five minutes without dramatically claiming that Obama and/or Holder aren't just pushovers who let the GOP roll over them, but actually more diabolical, more dangerous, more relentlessly destroying the planet and the Constitution than either Bush or Cheney who come off as boy scouts in comparison. Come on. It's obvious, at least to me. He's a player like Hedges and Greenwald and many another. And Maher is a shameless tool.

May 3, 2013

Nice research.

I'm going to put this link in my journal so I can find it easily.

March 20, 2013

The name of the book is "A Forest on the Sea"

by an ecological historian named Karl Appuhn, who knocks over a couple of widely held views of medieval foresting practices. The first is that they were suicidally exploitative, reducing a one-time powerhouse like Venice to a backwater once it had stripped its domestic timber supplies and deforested itself into poverty. Nice parable, it seems, but not what the record shows.

A second idea he knocks down is that renaissance forest management, when it was practiced, was mechanistic and Baconian, shrewdly focused on maximizing profit and disregarding natural, ecological or spiritual ends. This, too, proves a myth once the Venice record is examined. Here are the Amazon description and link, and a couple of screen-shot excerpts from the first chapter:

from page 9:



from pp. 23-24:

March 19, 2013

A couple of details from the NYT:

As the Mass began, Francis received two symbolic emblems of his office as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics — the fisherman’s ring, which recalls how St. Peter fished for food and later for souls, and the pallium, a white woolen vestment that symbolizes the role of the pope as a good shepherd.

{snip}

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the Vatican does not issue invitations. “Those who wish to come, can,” he said. “No one is refused. No one is invited. We welcome those who want to come.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is Catholic, will represent the United States at the Mass. The delegation also includes Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico; Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House; and John J. DeGioia, the president of Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/world/europe/installation-of-pope-francis.html?_r=0

. . . and from WaPo:

Francis directly addressed the leaders of the 132 nations arrayed around him, including Vice President Biden.

“Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be ‘protectors’ of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.

Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world!”



http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/catholic-church-inaugurates-pope-francis-in-huge-open-air-mass/2013/03/19/72a80ff2-9064-11e2-9cfd-36d6c9b5d7ad_story_1.html

March 19, 2013

Pope Francis urges protection of creation, weak

Source: AP via Monterey County Herald

By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press - Posted: 03/19/2013 12:15:35 AM PDT


Pope Francis waves to crowds as he arrives to his inauguration Mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Tuesday, March 19, 2013.


VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis has urged princes, presidents, sheikhs and thousands of ordinary people gathered for his installation Mass to protect God's creation, the weakest and the poorest of the world.

He is officially beginning his ministry as the 266th pope with a clear focus of his priorities.

Francis was interrupted by applause several times during his homily Tuesday, including when he spoke of the need to protect the environment and serve one another with love and tenderness and not allow "omens of destruction," hatred, envy and pride to "defile our lives."

Francis said the pope "must open his arms to protect all of God's people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important.

Read more: http://www.montereyherald.com/world/ci_22821363/st-peters-fills-pope-francis-installation

---

okay it's official, he's installed, now comes the hard part

March 19, 2013

It does seem agenda driven.

Verbitsky seems to be Bergoglio's calumniator-in-chief, and an energetic one, with no lack of custom for his rather dubious product. And from a first glance at his English wiki page, this oddly named character seems legitimate enough, with modest lists of real-sounding awards and publications and a picture of himself with current Argentine president Christina Fernández de Kirchner, wife of deceased former president Néstor Kirchner:



link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horacio_Verbitsky

The text tells us that Verbitsky is close to the Kirchners and has been accused of ignoring scandal on them that would otherwise be his cup of tea, which he admits to. Oh well, it's nice to have powerful friends, so why annoy them. The wiki page also lists his connection to a US-funded human rights NGO known as CELS, of which he is apparently president.

But several items in his story don't add up, starting with the odd timing of his Bergoglio tales, which surfaced with the 2005 publication of his El Silencio de Paulo VI a Bergoglio, a straightforward hit piece timed to knock Bergoglio out of the running to succeed John Paul 2, for which he's said to have come in second place after Joseph Ratzinger.

And an thing odd about this Daily Mail story, apart from his eagerness to get it published when the evidence it contains is so flimsy, is his story of having "discovered" this evidence of Bergoglio's perfidy while doing routine research in an archive, whereupon his feelings suddenly changed and voila, he became chief supplier of anti-Bergoglio dirt to US and British media eager to splash it around the world with no due diligence whatsoever.

Now what Verbitsky claims to have discovered, but in all likelihood was handed, is a carefully packaged document of three pages: first, Bergoglio's request for Jalic's passport extension sans return to Argentina, followed by a second page outlining objections to this request, imputed to Bergoglio but not written by him, shown below:



The third page is apparently the official stamped rejection. Only the second page, written by a government official, appears in the Daily Mail. This is a very flimsy reed to hang such a profound conversion as Verbitsky claims to have experienced, so profound that he makes himself the nemesis of a former friend, hounding him professionally and spreading damning rumors internationally. Other tales are also dubious, including his 1999 interview with Yorio (the other kidnapped priest) wherein Yorio allegedly claims Bergoglio collaborated with the junta to have himself and Jalic arrested, a claim vociferously denied by many, including Bergoglio, and confirmed by none. This crucial interview remained unpublished until six years later, when Yorio was long dead, and it was unverifiable.

So is Verbitsky just a crusading journalist? Well, maybe. But here's how his celebrated career began, via his wiki page:

During the 1970s he was a member of Montoneros, a peronist guerrilla organization that was engaged in terrorist activities in Argentina. According to him, he participated in shootings, during which "luckily" nobody died. . . . he was indicted for allegedly being involved in the planning and execution of the bombing of the Superintendence of Security of the Federal Police, on July 2, 1976 — a few months after the military coup — which caused 21 deaths among intelligence officers. The case was however closed in 2007 because of statute of limitations.

I'm not sure exactly what to make of this claim of having murdered 21 intel officers, but it seems that with that kind of accomplishment heading up his CV, there might be more going on here than we know.

March 18, 2013

p.s. an observation or two about Sam Ferguson's TNR article

that is the subject of Fisher's Washington Post piece:

1. Apparently the key testimony alleging that Bergoglio conspired with the Argentinian government in arranging for Yorio and Jalics' arrest comes from a personal interview with Yorio conducted by "journalist Horacio Verbitsky," the Democracy Now expert, but not published until six years later, in 2005, at which point (a) Yorio was six years dead, having died shorty after his interview with Verbitsky, and (b) Bergoglio's name was in play as a replacement to John Paul II. Needless to say, the job went instead to Joseph Ratzinger:

In a 1999 interview, conducted shortly before he died, Yorio said that he faulted Bergoglio for his kidnapping. Bergoglio denied complicity. After the interview was published in a book in 2005, a local human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio over the incident. The courts, however, have not taken any steps to indict Bergoglio, according to the lawyer, Marcelo Parrilli. But the interview appeared just as Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew#

Additionally, Yorio's recollections, confided only to Verbitsky, are of events that took place while he was in prison, and the other priest, who is still alive, has made no such statement against Bergogolio. There's more but it's late . . .

March 18, 2013

thanks Pinto. The Freudian-slip typo in that article's conclusion says it all,

doesn't it? In the first sentence of his concluding paragraph, Fisher's last word, "nothing," appears to be a typo for "noting":

Again, none of these divergences or contradictions are especially damning, but they are worth nothing. Perhaps it’s a sign that the now-pope may have left something out, or maybe it’s just what happens when you ask a then-74-year-old about a conflict that happened decades earlier and was difficult to understand even then.

Meaning literally that the "contradictions" noted in Sam Ferguson's New Republic article are worthless. And I have to say that at this point, although I've been waiting for the waters to cool before wading very deeply into this one, that is my conclusion too. Here's what I've gathered so far:

1 - The arrests of priests Yorio and Jalics occurred in 1976, when Bergoglio was an unusually young (37) prefect of the Jesuit order in Argentina, and that's really young;

2 - The hearing whose transcript Ferguson is evidently picking through was held in 2010, 34 years and half a lifetime later;

3 - Both priests were released alive after several weeks;

4 - Ferguson's suspicions in the TNR article mostly rest on (a) his feeling that Bergoglio didn't make it crystal clear exactly what he told the two priests in 1976, what he didn't tell them but hoped they'd infer, what official actions he took and what actions he implied he would take but didn't, and what permissions he unofficially reinstated after officially revoking them (mainly regarding their licenses to say mass)'; and

5 - (b) the fact that Bergoglio didn't subsequently go to law over the arrests, i.e. file charges to complain about them.

And though I haven't yet consulted Ferguson's TNR article, or much else besides the recent Democracy Now transcript and the 2011 Guardian article that have been banging around (links below), given the circumstances, including the reluctance of religious orders to insert themselves into secular matters -- and Jesuits were at one time famous (really infamous) for their habit of doing just that, to the point where the order was dissolved by the pope in 1773 and as a condition of reinstatement in 1814 explicitly forbidden to put priests into political office, meaning that a sensible Jesuit prefect is going to do everything possible to avoid the appearance of playing politics -- I strongly suspect that Bergoglio did what he had to do to protect the work of the order, unofficially did something else to protect the two priests, purposely did not create a paper trail, and wisely chose to let the matter drop once the priests reappeared alive.

Unfortunately this is a matter of sufficient complexity, ambiguity, and plain old antiquity to guarantee that it will never really go away.


p.s. many thanks to posters here and in GD valiantly trying to straighten all this out and say it in a few crisp sentences. Much easier I suspect to do what Amy Goodman (for example) does so well, i.e. dish dirt for a few minutes to an eager audience and then move on to the day's next juicy morsel. . . .

-----------------------
Added links:

1.) Jan. 4, 2011 Guardian article by Hugh O'Shaughnessy, which mostly rehashes dubious claims by "journalist" Verbitsky:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jan/04/argenitina-videla-bergoglio-repentance


2.) Transcript of Horacio Verbitsky's Democracy Now interview of Thursday, March 14, 2013:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/14/pope_francis_junta_past_argentine_journalist


3.) Sam Ferguson's New Republic article, "When Pope Francis Testified About the Dirty War," of Thurs., March 14, 2013, the subject of Max Fisher's WaPo piece linked in Pinto's post above: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112656/pope-francis-and-argentinas-dirty-war-what-he-knew#


4.) "Five facts about the Jesuits," January 8, 2008: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/five.facts.about.the.jesuits/16052.htm

March 17, 2013

2012 campaign edition:

2008 edition (they all have different lyrics):



Great find mikekohr. Happy St Pats to all!