Tom Engelhardt: A Club Med for Recreational Bombing

[unhappycamper]

A Club Med for Recreational Bombing
by Tom Engelhardt
Published on Friday, December 10, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up. In fact, if I were to offer a conspiracy theory to explain it, I might suggest that the U.S. government now exists mainly to feed material to The Daily Show. I'm referring to an article in the New York Times reporting that "the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization."

Don't laugh. No, really, stop it!

Honestly, it's perfectly sensible. Secrecy being such an all-encompassing value for our government, why shouldn't its employees work in the dark, even when the rest of us, the rest of the world, knows what's going on. Fortunately, I'm not an employee of the U.S. government or its military-industrial contractors; so, though Raytheon, the Library of Congress, and other places have been thoughtful enough to try to minimize the pain of the ongoing Wikileaks dump of State Department documents by blocking people from reading them, and the Obama administration and assorted Internet crews, including Amazon and PayPal, are trying to ensure that there won't be a fourth, fifth, or sixth round of dumps, I've been wandering the Web like any 12-year-old reading around.

You want to know what struck me? Something small. And it happened in Yemen, that anything-goes country whose president Ali Abdullah Saleh gave Washington almost carte blanche to act militarily -- "an open door on terrorism," as he put it to Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan in September 2009 (according to one of the State Department documents Wikileaks released). More like an open bomb bay, actually. And Saleh was even eager to take credit for those bombs we were dropping. "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," he told then-Centcom commander General David Petraeus last January.

In return for the right to drop bombs and launch missiles, the Yemeni president got his own "open door" -- directly into the U.S. Treasury: tons of money (it's euphemistically called "aid") shoveled his way, U.S. trainers and training for his troops, and lots of fancy military equipment because, let's face it, Washington is still laboring in a coalition-of-the-billing, not a coalition-of-the-willing world. Still, even for Saleh, there were limits and -- it's so Washington 2010 of us -- we nonetheless tried to exceed them. According to that State Department document, Petraeus evidently wanted to get U.S. troops -- probably Special Operations forces -- on the ground in combat areas with Yemeni units. According to a State Department observer, "Saleh reacted coolly, however, to the General's proposal to place USG (U.S. Government) personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time, direct feed intelligence from U.S. ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) platforms overhead."