Pull!

That thing shouldn't be allowed in a residential neighborhood. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Mitch. I don't want the mayor to send us nasty letters again. Five letters in one week is enough for any abandoned mill-squatter.

Oh, hi. I'm pretending to have just noticed you, looking at the blog post I wrote days ago. (What a giveaway!) We're having personnel issues again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, high in the hill country of Central New York, far from the beaten path. It's my own fault for taking on a mad science advisor. Sure, he helps us get to Neptune and other distant worlds. Sure, he bends time like Superman bends steel bars (i.e. with his bare hands). But the utility ends where the madness begins, and let me tell you something, friends - Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is as crazy as Jeremy Shaw's proverbial shithouse rat.

What's the source of the current eviction order? Well, Mitch heard an internet rumor that a certain Chinese Space Station - the Tiangong 1 - has been sputtering in a decaying orbit for the past few years, neglected by its owners, causing a threat to navigation high above the Earth's surface. He is now taking it upon himself to defend planet Earth by shooting the sucker out of the sky. Bet you can't guess how. No, not with a rocket. Nope, not a deadly Edward Teller-style laser. No, not an electron lasso (is that even a thing?). Give up? Me too. I don't freaking know.

All I can tell you, honestly, is that this project has consumed Mitch and our courtyard at the same time. He's spent the last week building a big howitzer-like monstrosity with a barrel that's got to be 80 feet long and a control panel with gauges, levers, flashing lights, electrical arcs, and steam whistles. (I think those are just for laughs, frankly.) Mitch refers to the device as his Positron Howitzer, though what that means I cannot tell you. But from what I've seen he can zero in on that sputtering space station and plant some kind of projectile in its side in a way that has the potential to ruin its whole day.

Matt wants me to dispatch Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to City Hall with some kind of peace offering - donuts or potato soup, something like that. I don't know. Those official threats are the only personal letters I receive anymore ... I'm a little reluctant to let them go.

Accountability.

The Trump clown car shed some bozos this week, most notably the media's favorite cabinet member, Rex Tillerson, former head of Exxon Mobil, who managed to seem avuncular and unthreatening in comparison with most of his colleagues - this while he systematically dismantled the State Department. Still, he did appear to be perhaps the greatest naysayer on tearing up the Iran deal. With the Koch Brothers invention Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, I'm sure we will nudge much closer to the 2000 bombing runs he once suggested as an effective means of halting the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. In a saner age, that alone might have been disqualifying, but certainly not today.

So, we'll now have an Iran warmonger as chief diplomat. And in Pompeo's old position at the head of the CIA, we will have the current deputy director Gina Haspel, a veteran of the Bush II-era Agency and a big fan of "rough" interrogation techniques (also known as torture). Haspel was directly involved in a CIA black site in Thailand where the Agency perpetrated torture of numerous individuals, including Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded by our operatives 89 times. She arrived after Zubaydah left, but later saw to it that incriminating tapes of this and similar episodes would be destroyed. For all those boning up on obstruction of justice standards in relation to the Trump White House, you might want to apply those standards to Haspel.

The torture crimes - essentially crimes against human dignity - are bad enough. But the fact that Haspel was part of an operation that was instrumental in the abuse of Zubaydah, whose extracted false testimony was key to the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq, raises this to another level. You know the plausible story on this - Bush/Cheney and company had decided upon the Iraq invasion well before 9/11 (and on some level, before taking office), but they needed a plausible pretext. They had no convincing evidence for their claims regarding an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Hussein or an active nuclear program, so they put the torturers to work at doing what they do best - getting people to say anything ... ANYTHING ... to stop the abuse. The very fact that they waterboarded Zubaydah 89 times indicates that they were looking for some response in particular. They got it, bogus as it obviously was, and from that proceeded the catastrophic Iraq war that is still killing people 15 years later - a conflict that, three years in, had resulted in more deaths than the 7-year Syrian civil war.

No one has been held accountable for the crime of the Iraq invasion, nor for the torture regime. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, but the least we can do is to stop rewarding the culprits with higher office. Maybe it wouldn't be entirely fair to start with Haspel, but we have to start somewhere.

luv u,

jp