Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett write for Counterpunch:

In any case, our lucky Neo Julian Assange was only able to enjoy his fugitive-from-justice status for a few hours. By noon, the charges were already dropped, and he was free to be defamed from one end of Sweden to the other, not to mention the countless websites. It’s a simple system: the websites show the headlines, and the headlines report the web gossip. It’s Character Assassination 101, but why in Sweden of all places couldn’t the dirty tricks department make the accusations stick?

Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

However, before we absolve the Swedish police as unwitting, if zealous, dupes, please note that Swedish law strictly forbids police and prosecutors to release to the media the details of any rape-connected complaint. The Expressen had all the details of the case, including the names of the accused and the complainant, within a matter of minutes. Please note further that the right-wing tabloid Expressen belongs to the Bonnier family, the biggest media owners in Sweden, who are not only pro-American but very much pro-Israel, too. As you know, the pro-Israeli lobby is warmly supportive of America’s Middle Eastern wars, while Assange and his WikiLeaks have the potential to undermine America’s weakening support for the war.

Were the criminal reporters of the Expressen that good, or is it possible that Ms. Ardin willingly collaborated with the Expressen in targeting our plucky Neo? She interned for the editorial page ofGT , the Gothenberg edition of Expressen. f

Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.

In other words, she was perfect for the job. In order to frame Julian in Singapore, they would have to fit him up with drugs. To frame Julian in England, they might have to report he had skinned and roasted cats or at least dumped a kitten in a trash bin. To hang a frame on Julian in Sweden only required reporting sex between consenting adults.

If the setup was so perfect, why did it fail? Overreach, as always. When Anna Ardin maneuvered the younger girl into assisting her in her revenge, she overreached herself. When the girl withdrew her report, Anna’s “deceit equals rape” accusation failed. However, this is just conjecture, and the true facts of the case lie deep in the vaults of the Expressen.

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If you love to see theater in Cincinnati, from Playhouse and Broadway touring to Know this is a great opportunity. That said, IDEAL students are writers first, who are eager to hone their writing and analytic skills by reviewing the Marx season at Playhouse and productions at theaters across Greater Cincinnati.

Classes meet monthly from September through May at Playhouse in Eden Park and attendance is mandatory. Sessions are approximately 90 minutes one Monday monthly beginning at 4 p.m. The class includes two Marx Theatre subscriptions and complimentary tickets at other assigned theaters.

The 2010-2011 class begins with an orientation session on Sept. 13. Deadline for application is Sept. 3.Students are nominated by teachers — who are asked to make a persuasive case. Almost 100 applications come in every year for 15 slots.

Buzzzzzzz is off to the Shaw Festival, I’ll tell you all about it next week. 

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Thurs. Oct. 21, 8 p.m.Fri., Oct. 22, 8 p.m.Sat., Oct. 23, 2:30 & 8 p.m.•
Studio Musical Theatre Series •
Under Construction II, Conceived and Choreographed by Diane Lala
Under Construction II explores aspects of love, separation, temptation, deceit, desire and discovery through dance, music and theatricality. A new “musical” by choreographer Diane Lala, the work employs a variety of dance styles set to selections by Peter Gabriel, John Williams, Peter Frampton and others to capture the ever-evolving nature of human passion. “Constructed” with creative input from the performers, the choreographer aims to translate ideas and emotions common to us all into dazzling three-dimensional form.Location: Cohen Family Studio TheaterAdmission: Admission is free. Reservations are required. 
Tickets available Mon., Oct. 18 at noon,  contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve.  Limit two tickets per order.
 
Thurs., Nov. 4, 8 p.m.Fri., Nov. 5, 8 p.m.Sat., Nov. 6, 2:30 & 8 p.m.•
Studio Drama Series •
Three SistersBy Anton Chekhov Diane Kvapil, director
The decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search for meaning in the modern world is the subject of Chekhov’s influential play, Three Sisters. Olga, Masha, and Irina are refined and cultured young women who were raised in urban Moscow but have been living in a small, colorless Russian provincial town for eleven years. With their father dead, their hopes lie heavily in their anticipated return to Moscow, while the painful monotony of day-to-day living exacts its toll. 
Admission is free. Reservations are required.  Tickets available Mon., Nov. 1 at noon, contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve.  Limit two tickets per order.

Thurs., February 3, 8 p.m.Fri., February 4, 8 p.m.Sat., February 5, 2:30 & 8 p.m.•
Studio Musical Theatre Series •
A Little Night Music Book by Hugh Wheeler, Steven Goldstein, director
Based on Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, this lyrical Tony Award-winning masterpiece is set at a country house in Sweden at the turn-of–the-century. Impossible liaisons and long-simmering passions come to light as the sun steadfastly refuses to set and the night smiles three times: once for the lovers, once for the dreamers and once for the fools. Witty and urbane, A Little Night Music fully captures the intricacies of love’s endless possibilities in haunting three-quarter time.
Admission is free. Reservations are required. Tickets available Mon., Jan 31 at noon, contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve. Limit two tickets per order.

Thurs., Feb. 10, 7 p.m.Fri., Feb. 11, 7 p.m.Sat., Feb. 12, 2 & 7 p.m.•
Studio Drama Series •
Transmigration – A festival of student-created new works.
TRANSMIGRATION, so named for “the movement from one place to another” or “the transition from one state of being to another,” is a festival of new works created by the acting students in CCM Drama. Performed simultaneously in three different locations around our complex, TRANSMIGRATION will allow the audience to sample four different 30-minute new works of their choosing in one spectacular evening. Recognized by CityBeat with a Best Alternative Theatre CINCINNATI ENTERTAINMENT AWARD nomination.
Admission is free. Reservations are required. Tickets available Mon., Feb. 7 at noon, contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve. Limit two tickets per order.

Thurs., April 28, 8 p.m.Fri., April 29, 8 p.m.Sat., April 30, 2:30 & 8 p.m.•
Studio Drama Series•
Red Light Winter by Adam Rapp, K. Jenny Jones, director
Adam Rapp’s play follows two men and a woman in very foreign territory. College friends Davis and Matt spend a wild, unforgettable evening in Amsterdam’s Red Light District with a beautiful young prostitute, Christina. Their lives are changed forever when the bizarre love triangle plays out in unexpected ways a year later in the East Village.
Admission is free. Reservations are required. Tickets available Mon., April 25 at noon, contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve.  Limit two tickets per order.

Thurs., May 12, 8 p.m.Fri., May 13, 8 p.m.Sat., May 14, 2:30 & 8 p.m.•
Studio Musical Theatre Series •
 Musicals Redux: Out of This World Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter, Roger Grodsky, director
Continuing our mission to resurrect gems from the storehouse of forgotten American musical theatre, Musicals Redux presents a stylish comic gem from the master, Cole Porter. A free adaption of Amphitryon by Plautus, Out of this World pits Roman gods and goddesses against each other with amusing results. Erudite and polished, the complicated plot-twists are all set to the timeless sophistication of a Porter score. Featuring the hit song, “From This Moment On,” Out of This World has seldom been seen since its Broadway debut in 1952.

Admission is free. Reservations are required. Tickets available Mon., May 9 at noon. Contact the CCM Box Office at (513) 556-4183 to reserve. Limit two tickets per order.

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I expected to be disappointed by “Green Zone”. I mean the movie, not the chunk of Baghdad we’ve spent seven years and trillions of dollars killing over a million people to steal for an “embassy” containing 21 buildings on 104 acres. I’d been told that this movie was Matt Damon actually following the guidance of his teacher Howard Zinn. I’d been told this was a movie to expose the war lies. I remained dubious.

And then I finally got a chance to see it.

Have you ever fantasized about what it would be like if popular culture wasn’t devoted to making our world a worse place, more hateful, more violent, more stupid and petty, more greedy and acquisitive? “Green Zone” is it. This is a movie that looks and feels exactly like a truly stupid, meaningless, or revenge- and greed-based Hollywood movie. But it isn’t.

I expected the war lies to get a brief mention, and the lesson taught to actually be that violence is fun and necessary. I expected underlings to get the blame for the lies. I expected the plot to fall down around the contrast between its protagonist’s stupidity in believing the lies about weapons and his genius in grasping impossible connections during the course of the story. I was wrong on all points.

The characters are composites, to be sure. Names and details have been changed, although certainly not to protect the innocent. But the basic account of what happened is laid out clearly, as well as cleverly, and gets it exactly right. The hero demonstrates the value of trust, including the importance of trusting Iraqis about Iraq, the importance of pushing back against authority, the need for restraint in violence but expansion in honest communication, and the crucial requirement that those guilty of the most serious crime imaginable — lying a nation into war — be held accountable, even if they wear nice suits and offer nice bribes to keep you quiet.

Yes, this is a look at the crazy WMD lies from the point of view of someone who believed them, rather than from the view of those of us who didn’t. But that’s an important angle to take, and one that a majority of Americans may be able to relate to, whether they are eager to admit it or not. It has not, after all, been very long since all that nonsense saturated our airwaves. The war is in fact — and it may be a little known fact — still going on, with the deadline for its completion at the end of next year due to be eliminated as soon as we have another U.S. election. This movie is far more relevant than most movies revealing war lies. There aren’t many such creations at all, and they tend to come out decades after a war has ended. In fairness, wars did used to end.

“Green Zone” has not been shown in any theater in my town. Places it has been shown may be done showing it now. Buy, don’t rent, the DVD. Show it to groups of people. Start a chapter of Screening Liberally if you don’t have a local group that hosts such events: http://livingliberally.org/screening And invite your member of Congress.

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On this year’s Outdoor Classics playbill: Shakespeare’s ”Love’s Labour’s Lost,” an early comedy about a group of young nobleman who swear off the company of women. Complications arise when a princess and her ladies come to their court. 

Curtain: 7 p.m. Sept 1-4, 10 and 11, 2 p.m. matinees Sept. 4,5 and 12. For more information visit the website at www.cincinnatioutdoorclassics.com.  The company’s home page still lists Anton Chekhov one acts as curtain-raisers beginning 45 minutes before the main event.

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Andrew Bacevich’s new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” is a good summary of the past 65 years’ worth of war thinking in Washington, D.C. “Prior to World War II,” he writes, “Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity.” For the past 65 years or so, Bacevich writes, these beliefs have been Washington’s “sacred trinity”:

“an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”

The people putting this expansion of Manifest Destiny into practice, Bacevich writes, have not fundamentally been presidents, as everyone believes, much less Congress, as the Constitution would have had it. “Pretending to the role of Decider, a president all too often becomes little more than the medium through which power is exercised.”

Bacevich highlights the roles of two men in establishing structures of war power, Allen Dulles at the CIA and Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air Command. They established the power, for themselves and their successors, respectively, to do anything at all in secret, and to determine nuclear weapons policies. And they established the practice of lying about Soviet military threats as a means toward escalating the already dominant U.S. military.

Bacevich describes President John Kennedy as taking some of these powers into the White House. “The methods devised by Allen Dulles and the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create an aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives.” And Bacevich points to LeMay’s public descent from revered wise man to dangerous buffoon as illustrative of the damage the Vietnam War did to Washington’s rules, damage that did not last long at all.

“Failure in Vietnam seemingly left the Washington rules in tatters,” writes Bacevich. “That within five years of Saigon’s fall they were well on their way to reconstitution qualifies as remarkable. That within another decade the American credo and sacred trinity had been fully restored deserves to be seen as astonishing.”

Bacevich repeats this sort of astonishment in the course of the story he tells, including when the end of the Cold War slows the U.S. war machine down even less than defeat in Vietnam did, and including when counter-insurgency theories are resurrected for General David Petraeus’ “surge”. Each time Bacevich is right to be astonished, but in each case the astonishment is lessened, I think, to the extent that one views war proponents as frauds rather than well-intentioned fools. That those in power, profiting financially and electorally from wars, immediately argue for more war is simply to be expected. That they persuade others to share their beliefs is, indeed, astonishing, albeit less so to the extent that one examines how our communications system works — something Bacevich does not do. The five year recovery post-Vietnam may have a recent parallel. By 2005, Washington’s war lies were in worse than tatters, but by 2010 it was considered impolite to mention that excuses for wars were lies.

By the time we get to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Bacevich is writing as though presidents are Deciders. He notes that the United States could now go to war without inconveniencing most of its people, and that wars tended to give boosts to presidents’ approval ratings. This was a major change, but another came when the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became understood as permanent or at least open-ended. And the military adopted a policy of “counter-insurgency” that involved primarily non-military work. This is another astonishing revolution, as Bacevich points out, except that — as far as I can tell — the military is not actually following its new policy. Are we putting 80% into civilian efforts? Last time I looked it was more like 4%.

“Washington Rules” was written before General Stanley McChrystal ended his career but not before he did things that should have ended it. When, in Bacevich’s account, McChrystal publicly pressures President Barack Obama to escalate Afghanistan, Bacevich returns to his discussion of the 1950s: Presidents are not the real power.

As in his past books, Bacevich does a terrific job of nudging the reader away from belief in popular militaristic and patriotic myths, in the direction of some beginning grasp of reality. And he explicitly charts a wiser course, a new “trinity”:

“First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests. Second, the primary duty of the American soldier is in America. Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense.”

Of course, that doesn’t resemble any just war tradition, and eight years ago the just war theorists were explaining the need to attack Iraq. The ONLY duty of the American soldier should be to defend the United States, minus any extraneous “vital interests.” But this is vast progress, and Bacevich describes himself in the introduction to his book as “a slow learner” who didn’t begin paying attention or asking questions until he was 41. He must also be a fast learner, because from that point on he’s come to understand and explain the U.S. empire as well as anyone.

But there are two areas in this book in which I think Bacevich is still resisting adequate questioning of orthodoxy. The first is in his understanding of U.S. news media. The media is never mentioned, except for a passing reference to media executives in a list of those benefitting from current policy. Repeatedly Bacevich laments the public’s backward attitudes, never considering where they come from if real, or noticing when the public is actually far ahead of what passes for “public discourse.” Does Bacevich know that a majority of Americans oppose the current wars? Even when Bacevich’s generalizations about the public may be fair, he omits any notice whatsoever of the sizable minority that opposes war mongering. Bacevich’s examples of heretics who have resisted the march to permanent war are always those with power and the prestige of having spent years going along, rather than early leaders or those with the most penetrating analysis. In Bacevich’s world a “left-leaning” publication is The New Republic.

The second place I see acceptance of the official story as getting in the way of Bacevich’s narrative is in his apparent belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Bacevich’s argument that people like Dulles held the reins of power would be stronger and look very different if he acknowledged the well-documented push-back against Kennedy’s firing of Dulles and Kennedy’s steps toward peace. According to Bacevich, “There is no evidence that any lessons drawn from his administration’s Cuban encounters had a positive effect on the way it dealt with Vietnam.” Kennedy, in Bacevich’s account, wanted war and more war in Vietnam, and everything was up to him. “At the White House, the president and his lieutenants were in charge of everything, including the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Yet, on October 11, 1963, Kennedy issued a secret order for a withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum 263. Two years earlier, as described in James Douglass’ “JFK and the Unspeakable” Kennedy successfully blocked public discussion of troop escalation by planting the false story in the media that his generals were against it. Yes, Kennedy mostly went along with the Washington Rules, but he tested their limits and apparently found them.

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Read it at http://bit.ly/d2n11E

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Incumbents who fall below 50% are generally viewed as endangered.

Rangel leads a crowded field of challengers led by Adam Clayton Powell IV with 21%, Joyce Johnson with 7%, Jonathan Tasini with 6%, and Vince Morgan with 2%. These candidates filed enough petitions to qualify for the ballot, but Rangel’s campaign is trying to throw some of those candidates off the ballot by challenging their petitions.

The race is largely a referendum on Rangel himself: 49% approve of Rangel’s job performance, 27% disapprove, and 24% are unsure. Rangel’s ethics problems are likely to become a central issue in the weeks ahead, as his opponents highlight an ongoing House ethics investigation.

Among likely voters, 47% think Rangel should stay in Congress to deal with the ethics charges, while 35% would prefer Rangel to retire with his reputation intact. Several of Rangel’s opponents predict he will retire before the 2012 election, even if he wins another term in 2010. Rangel turned 80 in June.

Powell, who lost badly to Rangel in a 1994 primary, has his own ethics problem: a 2008 arrest for drunken driving that resulted in a conviction for a lesser charge of driving while impaired.

On a key national issue, likely voters oppose Rangel’s proposal to re-institute a military draft by 47%-33%. A plurality of 37% want U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan in 2010, and a solid majority of 69% want them home by the end of 2011. Just 17% want to U.S. troops stay until the Taliban is defeated. On July 1, Rangel cast a key vote for $33 billion to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to expand fighting against the Taliban. Democrats.com, an online community of 635,000 Democratic activists based in Queens, is supporting Jonathan Tasini because of his strong opposition to additional war funds.

On a key local issue, likely voters are divided on Rangel’s responsibility for gentrification in Harlem. 20% hold him very responsible, 32% somewhat responsible, 19% not very responsible, and 19% are not concerned about gentrification.

Voters also reject the idea that the district, which covers diverse areas of northern Manhattan, should be represented by any particular ethnic group. Just 10% think the seat should be held by an African-American and only 5% by a Latino, while 83% think it should be held by the best candidate of any race. Respondents identified themselves as 37% African-American, 31% white, 10% Puerto Rican, 10% Dominican, and 12% other. Women outnumbered men by 60% to 40%, and voters over 45 were 82% of respondents.

The poll of 682 likely Democratic primary voters was conducted on July 17-18 by Public Policy Polling, a national firm based in North Carolina. According to the Wall Street Journal, PPP was the second most accurate pollster in swing Presidential states in 2008.

File attachments: 

NY15Results.pdf

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