Keeping ILLUMINATUS! fresh

The United States government, doing its bit to keep ILLUMINATUS! fresh for a new generation of readers, continues to act in ways that almost defy satire.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, Leon Panetta (then the CIA director) announced two years ago, "CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites." Greenwald then links to an article in The Nation magazine, about the CIA's secret prison in Somalia.

Greenwald notes, "Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: 'US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners' and are 'there full-time,' Scahill reported." Kind of like the gangsters you read about who put their assets in somebody else's name.

The Jeremy Scahill piece Greenwald links to includes this sentence, referring to a recently-killed Al Quada leader, "A JSOC attempt to kill him in a January 2007 airstrike resulted in the deaths of at least seventy nomads in rural Somalia, and he had been underground ever since." (The JSOC is the "Joint Special Operations Command," a U.S. anti-terrorism force.)

Hey, they're just "nomads."