DOUBLE STANDARD? When John Cusack bombards his girlfriend's home with music, it's cute. When the CIA uses a boombox, it's torture.

So, a pretentious group of musicians is upset that their music is being used to torment America’s most dangerous enemies?

And now they want the U.S. government to release an official song list?

I can’t imagine that such a document actually exists. Are we supposed to believe that CIA and Pentagon interrogators around the world were issued official playlists by some audio-torture DJ?

It’s a safe bet that the music choices used to keep terrorists awake 24/7 were straight from a gazillion different iPods.

However, there WAS an official songlist when the U.S. Army flushed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1989. The psychological warfare guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy during “Operation Just Cause” called in their requests to Army Radio.

How retro.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" made this dictator's skin crawl!

THE OFFICIAL 1989 MUSIC TORTURE SONG LIST FOR NORIEGA

Straight from U.S. Army records, here is a portion of the radio playlist used to annoy Manuel Noriega.

1. (You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming — Judas Priest
2. All I Want is You — U2
3. Big Shot — Billy Joel
4. Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
5. Bring Down the Hammer — Georgia Satellites
6. Don’t Look Back — Boston
7. Don’t Fear the Reaper — Blue Oyster Cult
8. Eat My Shorts — Rick Dees
9. Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone) — Tom Petty
10. Give It Up — KC and the Sunshine Band
11. Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down — Paul Young
12. Guilty — Bonham
13. Hang ‘Em High — Van Halen
14. Hanging Tough — New Kids on the Block
15. I Fought The Law and the Law Won — Bobby Fuller
16. Judgment Day — Whitesnake
17. Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
18. No More Mister Nice Guy — Alice Cooper
19. Panama — Van Halen
20. Paranoid — Black Sabbath
21. Stay Hungry — Twisted Sister
22. The Party’s Over — Journey
23. The Star Spangled Banner — Jimi Hendrix
24. They’re Coming to Take Me Away — Henry VIII
25. Time is on My Side — Rolling Stones
26. Wanted Dead or Alive — Bon Jovi
27. We Didn’t Start the Fire — Billy Joel
28. We Gotta Get Out of This Place — The Animals
29. Who Will You Run To? — Heart

Who knew that Billy Joel and New Kids on the Block would ever serve their country so effectively?

Wanna see the full list of Noriega torture tunes?  CLICK HERE.

Also, maybe it’s just me, but I think Cheney should have realized that his audience was broader than the American Enterprise Institute. Because his joke at the beginning about Obama’s speech earlier in the day being too long set the wrong tone, especially since his speech went fairly long too.

But hey, watch them for yourself and tell me what you think.

First Obama’s…

Then Cheney’s…

Discuss.

Looks like Iran decided to remind us why we don’t want that nation getting nuclear weaponry:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran test-fired a new advanced missile Wednesday with a range of about 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, southeastern Europe and U.S. bases in the Middle East.

Experts believe Iran is still six to eight years away from being able to equip such a missile with a nuclear warhead (not to mention that they don’t yet have nuclear capabilities), but the today’s test will hardly make relations with Iran any easier. It’ll be interesting to see how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton choose to react to such a provocative action.

As always with these unfriendly nations, options are limited and every course of action will have undesirable consequences.

So, Dick Cheney has been going around telling everyone that President Obama is making us less safe by daring to change some of the Bush era national security policies. But Jack Goldsmith at The New Republic says Cheney’s criticisms don’t hold up. Obama has actually changed very little outside rhetoric and packaging.

Goldsmith details eleven policy areas and explains how Obama has maintained or deviated from the Bush positions. The article is well worth the read and paints Obama as exceedingly cautious about changing the ways the Bush administration was handling the war and terrorism during the final years of the Bush presidency. Obama may be speaking more softly but he’s still carrying a big stick.

Usually, when people debate why the conservative movement has hit hard times, they argue about whether Republicans are fiscally conservative enough or whether they are too focused on social issues. Rarely does the third tent pole of modern conservativism get mentioned: the national security conservatives. But that’s the exact group to blame argues Daniel Larison in The Week:

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

Larison is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, part of the Pat Buchanan wing of the conservative movement (wing? More like alcove these days) – so you know he comes at this with a certain isolationist bias. But is he right? Are Republicans losing because they can’t divorce themselves from the national security policies of the Bush years?

Seems to me it’s a lot more complicated than that. But it’s worth considering. After all, the Republicans were once known for their realism abroad and that, in turn, made the party look mature and capable. Without that realism on weighty matters, can the party hope to regain the trust of the American people? Does Larison have a point?

(Egypt’s 1973 October War Panorama Museum — NY Times photo)

One of my biggest regrets during my post-college backpacking jaunt through Cairo was that the October 1973 War Panorama Museum was closed.

Like a kid stretching his neck over the fence at a shut-down amusement park, I stared through the iron grates at a sculpture garden decorated with Russian MiG fighter jets. I wanted to at least bring home a snowglobe from the gift shop, but the place was undergoing renovations.

This museum is a monumental tribute to Egypt’s “victory” in the 1973 October War (or Yom Kippur War if you’re willing to acknowledge the military value of surprise and meanness to attack on a religious holiday).

According to the Egypt State Information Service, the museum was inspired by President Hosni Mubarak’s 1983 trip to North Korea and is divided into four areas:

The Circular Hall: Highlights the achievements of the Egyptian Armed Forces in the period from 1967 to 1973.

Hall 2: In which the crossing of the Suez Canal is graphically shown.

Hall 3: Showcases the achievements of the various branches of the Army during the October War.

Hall 4: A library with a reading hall attached.

Now, thanks to The New York Times, I can see what one of the museum panoramic views looks like. Looks like a lot of Egyptian model railroaders were employed by the state in some kind of job stimulus package.

The Times also reports that many younger Egyptians are pissed about the 1979 Camp David Peace Accords. An entire generation grew up without shedding a drop of blood in the Sinai desert and they are pissed.

They saw a couple of war movies and well, it looks like a whole heck of fun!

From the Times:

“Today Egypt is not influential in anything,” said Osama Anwar Okasha, a leading Egyptian television writer. “It is a third-class country in this region. Egypt was the leading country and it gave up this leading role. Now it is like a postman, delivering messages.”

“The public mood is dark all around right now, and the sentiment points to the treaty as the start of Egypt’s decline and diplomatic impotence.”

But the 81-year-old Mubarak, who has been eligible for his AARP membership for those same 30 years, is still alive and he remembers how unfun bleeding in the Sinai can be.

Yet, he’s also the guy who likes to build war museums. Even if his exhibits don’t tell the full story (memo to Mubarak: Israel won — even Wikipedia says so), I still want my October Panorama snowglobe.

**

Darren Garnick is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker obsessed with the offbeat side of the Middle East, such as the latest “Austin Powers” fembot fashions that are the latest rage in Syria.

Jim Jones in his Marine Corps days

General Jones is in charge.  At least he thinks so, which probably means that’s the way President Obama wants it. That’s my reading of this story in today’s Washington Post:

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. “The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful,” he said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the “back channels” that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.

“We’re not always going to agree on everything,” Jones said, and “so it’s my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented” to the president. “But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, ‘Well, what do you think, Jones?,’ I’m going to tell him what I think.”

The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC’s reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table — historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state — determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.

“The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said.

Jones’ new, improved NSC will be better able to contend with such “department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure.” Interestingly, after a “review” now being conducted by Jones’ deputy, the once-likely CIA director, John Brennan, the NSC will fold in some functions of the Homeland Security Council, established after 9/11 mainly to coordinate counter-terrorism activities. Jones also plans to re-jigger the organizational charts of Defense, State and other agencies so that everyone dealing with, say, Pakistan, will be in the same box — the better for NSC to coordinate.

The Post goes on to note that other new presidents have juggled the NSC set-up, mode of operation, and participation beyond the limited statutory members “to fit his own needs and style,” and that “the role and power of the president’s national security adviser, and the size of his staff, have grown larger or smaller depending on the president’s wishes.”

It would seem that President Obama wishes General Jones to have a conspicuously big role and power to ride herd on “powerful figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates” and a “national security pyramid” that is “heavy with military officials” like retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as Director of National Intelligence” and big shot “special envoys to trouble spots” including Richard C. Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan and former senator George J. Mitchell to the Middle East.

I suspect that the chair rearranging to meet “department-spanning 21st-century issues” is at least in part a bit of sugar-coating of an effort to keep a tight rein in Jones’ hands on Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. Participation in NSC deliberations as needed by Treasury, Justice, Energy, etc. will be nothing new, as can be seen from this description of the Council.

Lest anyone be slow enough to miss the point that Jones is in charge, the General spelled it out:

“I believe in collegiality . . . in sounding out people and getting them to participate,” Jones said. “I notice the president is very good at that.” But he made clear he plans to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. “The most important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you’re the guy around which the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I’m the chairman.” One of the first of many internal Bush administration clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair NSC meetings.

In his initial conversations with Obama before taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being “in charge” and having open and final access to the president on all national security matters. “We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the national security adviser,” Jones said of Obama.

All of which makes a lot of sense. Now, if only Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, Denny Blair, the Joint Chiefs, Richard Holbrooke, et al. would all agree!

Got any thoughts about this?  Post a comment.

(Visit me at The Purple Center)