The Colt 45 Chronicle #40

One of the nice things about the about the old location of the local where I work is that it was a convenient walking distance to the Douglass Truth Library. I would often go there during my lunch break and sit in the comfortable chairs and read the New York Times and maybe doze off for a few minutes. I would also browse the music compact discs. One album I discovered was II by The Psychic Paramount. It sounded distinctly different. On the band's Wikipedia page the genres listed are experimental rock, noise rock and psychedelic rock. There's definitely a No Wave/Glenn Branca vibe to it, but it also has a Hardcore/Flipper-like edge.

This morning I heard the last track off II, "N5 Coda," as I suffered up the last hill on my second eight-mile run in as many days (I'm trying to get ready for a 10K next Sunday), and I was reminded how good The Psychic Paramount is.

My cohort at the university all went on to be doctors and lawyers and journalists and professors and IT professionals. I am the odd man out in that I am a secretary, a.k.a., office worker or support staff personnel. This letter, number 40, like last week's, is addressed to my friend Niall; it is devoted to my friendship with his older brother who had just made his mark professionally as a reporter. Though written while drunk, as all these letters were when I first arrived in New York City in my early twenties, it nonetheless contains an honest assessment of aspiration and achievement. The last paragraph is a young man's farewell to friendship.

Spring 1989 

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, which means go up to a mountain, on top of a mountain, and say what it is that you want to say. I heard about Colum's successes tonight from Terri, how he's got stuff printed in the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK and the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and man I'll tell you, I feel so happy about it, about the deservedness of Colum's successes, so clean and unthreatened and peaceful and devoted, that I almost feel bad about it: one, because I really haven't written to him and provided him with moral support; and two, because it rnakes me realize how unenergetic and unrisky and scared my life really is. Colum had something to do, and he did it, which is what it's all about, isn't it? But he did it alone, and I feel like I kinda stopped being his friend. I never wrote and he never wrote and I never called and he never called, and on and on, dribbling into laziness and unappreciation. The last time I talked to Colum was in January at your place. I remember getting stoned all of us together the first night you were back from LA when Mark and Gail were there; I remember the football game in the parking lot; I remember driving him in my VW bus over the Bay Bridge while he snuggled in the back with Terri wrapped in a sleeping bag; and I remember just me and him alone in the Oak Street apartment -- you had gone over to sleep at Eve's house; Terri and Mark had left to go to a few clubs -- listening to Bob Dylan. That night it was like this: the two old men together, too old to go out and rock with the kiddies, old and forlorn and fundamentally lonely, alone. We chatted for a bit, talked about I don't know what, and then decided to turn in. We walked into your room, shut off the lights, got into bed, put our heads on the pillows, and fell asleep. -- Two old pals alone together and going to bed, no girlfriends to go over and sleep with, no bars to hop, nothing to do but say good night and go to bed. I felt like my dead granddad -- vulnerable and pure and teetering and tired. But none of it bad, not in the least; in fact, very  good, totally honest and at home, a kinda of feeling I don't even feel with my own family, except for maybe my father. Oh, well. I can remember more if I tried, but that's not the point. The point is that I feel shitty about not taking more care for Colum. 

I think what happened in the last two or three years is that Colum figured out what it is that he wanted to do, and if not wanted to do, what he should do, and should do in the sense of really doing it. We're still wafting around in early twenties uncertainty and fear. He had no time for such shit. And he's right. Hopefully we'll find the energy a few years from now to make the kind of choices he did. 

It's not all my fault and it's not all your fault and it's not all Colum's fault. It has something to do with the fact that the earth is the dirt of sadness and that time fades away. -- There will be no more games of One Hand on the porch at night as the black-and-white television blabbers on the kitchen chair; there will be no more hash browns cooked in olive oil on electric stoves in 1985; there will be no more Socrates discussed over coffee and beer and hot dogs as Leslie complains about too much noise; there will be no more pisses in toilets in nooks in apartments on Dana Street. And no matter how much I'm accused of goldbricking, and no matter how much I'm chastised for backward looking and lauding the past, there is one thing I will always be when it comes to things like this, and that is right.

CIA Drone Base in the Land of Mecca and Medina

In case you missed it, because it was easy to do, last Tuesday there was a great piece written by Tom Engelhardt and posted on his web site, TomDispatch.com.  Titled "Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve," it tells how the media at the behest of the Obama administration sat for over a year on the story that a secret CIA drone facility had been established on Saudi Arabian soil:

Last Tuesday [two weeks ago, February 5], the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by “an informal arrangement” agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation.

According to the Post, approximately two years ago, the CIA got permission from the Saudi government to build one of its growing empire of drone bases in a distant desert region of that kingdom. The purpose was to pursue an already ongoing air war in neighboring Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. 

The first drone mission from that base seems to have taken off on September 30, 2011, and killed American citizen and al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki. Many more lethal missions have evidently been flown from it since, most or all directed at Yemen in a campaign that notoriously seems to be creating more angry Yemenis and terror recruits than it’s killing. So that’s the story you waited an extra year to hear from our watchdog press (though for news jockeys, the existence of the base was indeed mentioned in the interim by numerous media outlets).

Engelhardt then proceeds to provide an excellent thumbnail sketch -- his article is worth reading just for this -- of our involvement with Osama bin Laden in bloodying the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan; and from there our first war with Saddam Hussein that led to a U.S. military presence in the Muslim holy land of Mecca and Medina; thereby creating the main rationale for al-Queda's 9/11 attack. One notable accomplishment of Bush's 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq is that it led to the withdrawal of combat troops from Saudi Arabia. But now, after enormous amounts of blood and treasure, we're back. As Engelhardt says,

And so we reach this moment and the news of that two-year-old secret Saudi drone base. You might ask yourself, given the previous history of U.S. bases in that country, why the CIA or any administration would entertain the idea of opening a new U.S. outpost there. Evidently, it’s the equivalent of catnip for cats; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

We don’t, of course, know whether they blanked out on recent history or simply dismissed it out of hand, but we do know that once again garrisoning Saudi Arabia seemed too alluring to resist. Without a Saudi base, how could they conveniently strike al-Qaeda wannabes in a neighboring land they were already attacking from the air? And if they weren't to concentrate every last bit of drone power on taking out al-Qaeda types (and civilians) in Yemen, one of the more resource-poor and poverty-stricken places on the planet? Why, the next thing you know, al-Qaeda might indeed be ruling a Middle Eastern Caliphate. And after that, who knows? The world? 

Honestly, could there have been a stupider gamble to take (again)? This is the sort of thing that helps you understand why conspiracy theories get started -- because people in the everyday world just can’t accept that, in Washington, dumb and then dumber is the order of the day. 

When it comes to that “secret” Saudi base, if truth be told, it does look like a conspiracy -- of stupidity. After all, the CIA pushed for and built that base; the White House clearly accepted it as a fine idea. An informal network of key media sources agreed that it really wasn’t worth the bother to tell the American people just how stupidly their government was acting. (The managing editor of the New York Times explained its suppression by labeling the story nothing more than "a footnote.") And last week, at the public part of the Brennan nomination hearings, none of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community with what little oversight they get, thought it appropriate to ask a single question about the Saudi base, then in the news. 

The story was once again buried. Silence reigned. If, in the future, blowback does occur, thanks to the decision to build and use that base, Americans won’t make the connection. How could they? 

It all sounds so familiar to me. Doesn’t it to you? Shouldn’t it to Washington?

To get a feeling why the Obama administration is engaging in what seems so obviously a retrograde geopolitical move read yesterday's article by Robert Worth on the current state of affairs in Yemen. To summarize quickly, it's a mess. If not a "failed state," in national security parlance, then certainly a state close to coming apart. The south, which as recently as 1990 was its own state, is moving towards independence.

Some progress has been made. A military campaign last year recaptured several southern towns from the jihadist militants who had controlled them for more than a year. But most of the fighters seem to have melted back into the population, and in the wake of the military’s withdrawal, large areas of the south remain a checkerboard of mysterious armed groups with no government presence. 

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate has adopted a new tactic: a ruthless campaign of assassinations that has left 74 military and intelligence officers dead since the start of last year, according to Interior Ministry officials. Almost all of the killings have been carried out by masked gunmen on motorcycles — often with pistols equipped with silencers — and only a few suspects have been arrested.

The new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is weak. He's a southerner who is reviled in the south; a man without an independent base of support in a tribal society. On top of all of this -- a weak chief executive, a secessionist movement, a surging al-Qaeda -- there is a burgeoning proxy sectarian war:

Another rising threat is the growth of an increasingly violent and sectarian confrontation between two of Yemen’s largest political groups. One of those groups, known as the Houthi movement, is led by radical adherents of a variant of Shiite Islam and has been accused of receiving support from Iran. Its followers have clashed repeatedly with youths from Islah, Yemen’s main Sunni Islamist party and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

This conflict has taken on aspects of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia — which supports Islah — and Iran, with troubling Sunni-Shiite overtones. The Houthis have grown increasingly strident, holding vast public rallies modeled after those of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement. The two groups regularly malign each other in sectarian terms — a new occurrence in Yemen — and on several occasions, rallies have devolved into rock-throwing and even gun battles between members of the two camps.

So all the ingredients are there for a failed state and anarchy and chaos. And you can tell what the Obama administration is thinking, since its answer to all sources of turbulence in the Muslim world is the drone, "Let's get a base close to Yemen so we can bomb it when it all goes to hell." What are the lessons of history compared to a clear flight path for a bombing run?

While not totally apposite here, why not Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom on "Jah Warriors"?