March 2004 Archives

You know you live in a surreal world when the largest software company in the world can say this and nobody drops to the ground, rolling on the floor laughing.

Fewer serious flaws, Gates tells customers

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates said yesterday that improvements in software design and testing are cutting the number of serious flaws in its products.

I must admit that I find this highly amusing (my mirror and the mirror of Dave's reaction as origional site has lost its bandwidth). I also must say that this pretty much means the Bush administration has jumped the shark (at least in my book). This whole "he said, she said" thing going on in broad daylight on a major media conduit . . .

<heh>

These last two weeks have really highlighted the weak spots in this administration. It's like waving a red cape in front of a bull. They charge at it every time.

Seems like an interesting strategy would be to set up some strategic "honey pots" for this administration to get attracted to and make asses of themselves in responding to them. Clarke is another perfect example where they simply lost it and did far more damage to themselves than anyone could ever dream of doing to them.

The Bush administration is their own worst enemy. They will gladly shoot themselves through the foot in their mad attempt to crush anyone who threatens them. As they've shown with Condi, they will gladly shoot themselves through the head while shooting their foot.

Rove is completely overloaded at this point, and things are only going to get worse as the hot summer progresses. He's popping fuses left and right. Hughes is trying to hold everything together despite being out of the loop for quite a while. Everyone hates everyone else because they all know they're just a bunch of unelected frauds who have been trying to hold it together since day one.

I simply cannot believe that Bush needs Cheney by his side when he goes to testify before the 9/11 commission. I mean, really! They must be absolutely terrified that they won't tell the same story - or worse.

Position of strength. Confidence.

Not.

<giggle>

Special danger update! Wolfowitz of Baghdad. If this is a trial balloon, it's a hoot!

This is despicable.

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington's top policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

I guess this is because it's really a war metaphor and not a law enforcement problem, right?

I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied

he Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday.

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The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

The disclosure, to a House Ways and Means subcommittee, came near the end of a routine hearing into the I.R.S. budget after most of the audience, including reporters, had left the hearing room.

It comes as the White House is fighting to maintain its image as a vigorous and uncompromising foe of global terrorism in the face of questions about its commitment and competence raised by the administration's former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and its first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill.

Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat whose question to a witness about one line on the last page of a routine report to Congress prompted the disclosure, said he was dumbfounded at the budget decision.

"The zeroing out of resources here made my jaw drop open," Mr. Pomeroy said. "It just leaps out at you."

"There are some very tough questions that have to be answered about why the decision was made to eliminate these positions because going after the financial underpinnings of terrorist activity is crucial to rooting terrorism out and defeating it," Mr. Pomeroy said.

Truly a wonderful environment in which to nurture a fledging democracy. I guess this is the logical conclusion of the RWAP rhetoric against intellectuals?

Iraqi intellectuals flee 'death squads'

In recent months assassinations have targeted engineers, pharmacologists, officers, and lawyers.

More than 1000 leading Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been assassinated since last April, among them such prominent figures as Dr Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University.

The identity of the assailants remains a mystery and none have been caught.

But families and colleagues of victims believe that Iraqi parties with foreign affiliations have an interest in wiping out Iraq's intellectual elite.

Media reports suggest that more than 3000 Iraqi academics and high-profile professionals have left Iraq recently, not to mention the thousands of Iraqis who are traveling out of the country every day in search of work and safety.

"Iraqis used to leave Iraq during the 13-year UN sanctions for better work opportunities, but they are leaving now to avoid being assassinated by unknown, well-organised death squads," said political analyst and politics professor Dhafir Salman.

Usama al-Ani, director of the research and development department in the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research said top Iraqi scientists have been targeted by foreign parties.

"I believe Iraqi scientists are being targeted by foreign powers, most probably Israel."

There is a contrast to be made here in revolutionary situations. In 1949 when the Chinese Communists came to power, they actively tried to keep entrepreneurs and professionals in the country, and made special arrangements to allow that. In contrast, in 1979 when Khomeini carried out the clerical revolution in Iran, the hardliners chased most of the really talented professionals out of the country. Iran suffered horribly as a result.

So, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim Governing Council can do things the Chinese way, or the Khomeini way. It looks as though CAzaelabi is taking them in the Khomeini direction. It can't be good for the future of Iraq to lose nearly 10% of its academics. Some of those may have been involved in Baath Party dirty tricks, but were all? And, the campaign of assassination makes a mockery of the rhetoric about democratization.

Just ducky.

Will US Policy Backfire in Central Asia?

Central Asian leaders are exploiting their part in the “war on terror” to legitimise damaging policies.

American engagement with the Central Asian states – key allies in the “war on terror” - is being misrepresented and exploited by regional governments, whose actions are fuelling instability in the region, local and international analysts believe.

Authoritarian leaders especially in Uzbekistan, the main player, continue to ignore pleas for change in their human rights practices. They are misreading – sometimes wilfully – the signals sent by the United States that political reform is important, too, and continuing in the belief that as valued partners they can do pretty much as they like.

America continues to be a major donor of programmes to promote democracy and civil rights in Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and to a limited extent Turkmenistan. Officials argue they are doing a lot to encourage change in places like Uzbekistan.

But many analysts argue that these positive initiatives have now been so overshadowed by the military agenda, where a readiness to provide air bases and other facilities is key to improving relations, that regional governments feel empowered to ignore them and continue with poor policies that threaten to alienate their populations.

“The most important thing [for the West] is to maintain stability in Central Asia. And this stability is linked to the authoritarian regimes," said Alexei Malashenko, a regional expert at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. “The West has exerted pressure [for reform], but the interests of stability and economics will always prevail."

Failing to convince Central Asian leaders of the need for change could result in them acting in ways that sow the seeds for future unrest and possibly conflict in this majority Muslim region.

Lorne Craner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour told IWPR that the US was well aware of the causal links between poverty, repression and militancy, "We know that while there is no justification for terrorism, repressive societies without economic development and where there is social exclusion have been breeding-grounds for terrorists. That is a simple fact. We don't want to see that continue. We want to see things advanced for both of those reasons."

Weary special forces quit for security jobs

Exhausted American and British special forces troopers, the West's front line in the war on terrorism, are resigning in record numbers and taking highly-paid jobs as private security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior US commanders are so alarmed that they have held emergency meetings to agree new deals on pay and conditions for the men.

Men from the SAS in Britain and Australia and America's Delta Force are said to be weary after almost 30 months of nearly continuous service since the September 11 attacks.

Gen Bryan "Doug" Brown, head of the US special operations command, summoned his commanders to Washington for a crisis meeting last week. He told the Senate armed services committee that the retention of special forces had become "a big issue".

US special forces troopers earn up to £30,000 but are being offered packages of £60,000 to £120,000 to work in combat zones.

For SAS soldiers earning £250 a week in Iraq, the lure of up to £1,000 a week is easily understood. The most experienced men in the most dangerous jobs are reported to be making £5,000 a week.

The manning crisis comes as Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, pushes the military to use special forces more and more widely, favouring them over conventional forces, for their speed, small scale and ability to operate in complete secrecy with only minimal legal oversight.

Gen David Grange, a retired army Ranger, Green Beret and member of Delta Force - the elite, top-secret unit modelled on the SAS - told The Telegraph yesterday that family pressures were also taking their toll on his former colleagues.

"In my Vietnam platoon two people were married. Now it's maybe 60 per cent. Even if special forces are wild characters, with high divorce rates, there's still enormous pressure from families. They've been away more or less continuously since September 11 and wives are asking, 'Where the hell are you?' "

The war on terrorism has placed unprecedented strains on special forces. Gen Grange said: "The US army alone has people in 120 countries.

"A lot of those people are special forces - counter-drug, counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism - as well as our own insertions."

Iraqi Insurgents Kill 4 Contractors, Abuse Corpses

Insurgents have killed four civilians working for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and a crowd gathered to celebrate the attack in Fallujah dragged the bodies through the streets.

Television pictures from Fallujah showed Iraqis kicking and beating the burned and dismembered corpses, and at least two of them were hanged on a bridge.

Just when all the RWAP was singing the praises of a lower causualty count, the month of March slaps them in the face:

51 dead American soldiers. All from hostile action (none from accidents). One of them a friend of mine. For those who care about such things, that is 1.6 soldiers dead per day. The highest number since November of last year.

For the month of March, 300 soldiers were wounded - 276 from hostile action, 24 from non-hostile reasons.

Somehow I don't think the RWAP is going to be crowing about the month of March.

Oh, and please note that these numbers are just the US soldiers killed and wounded. These numbers don't include the number of Iraqi policeman and Iraqi civilians killed, maimed and injured during the month of march. No word on those numbers, but from the news reports this month, it's got to be pretty high.

For details, go here.

Dead Zones Emerging as Big Threat to 21st Century Fish Stocks

There are nearly 150 oxygen-starved or "dead zones" in the world's oceans and seas, a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) shows.

These "dead zones" are linked to an excess of nutrients, mainly nitrogen, that originate from agricultural fertilizers, vehicle fumes, factory emissions and wastes. Low levels of oxygen in the water make it difficult for fish, oysters and other marine creatures to survive as well as important habitats such as sea grass beds

Experts claim that the number and size of deoxygenated areas is on the rise with the total number detected rising every decade since the 1970s. They are warning that these areas are fast becoming major threats to fish stocks and thus to the people who depend upon fisheries for food and livelihoods.

The damn thing still doesn't work anyway. And there's about a million low tech ways to foil it. Still, I wonder how long it will be before everyone has this and our multi-billion dollar boondoggle is a useless piece of crap? Oh wait. I know the answer to that . . .

Russia Boasts "revolutionary" Weapon to Overcome U.S. Star Wars Defense

Russia has designed a "revolutionary" weapon that would make the prospective U.S. missile defense useless, Russian news agencies reported Monday, quoting a senior Defense Ministry official.

The official, who was not identified by name, said tests conducted during last month's military maneuvers would dramatically change the philosophy behind development of Russia's nuclear forces, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported.

If deployed, the new weapon would take the value of any U.S. missile shield to "zero," the news agencies quoted the official as saying.

The official said the new weapon would be inexpensive, providing an "asymmetric answer" to U.S. missile defenses, which are proving extremely costly to develope.

Russia, meanwhile, also has continued research in prospective missile defenses and has an edge in some areas compared to other nations, the official said.

The statement reported Monday was in line with claims by President Vladimir Putin's that experiments performed during last month's maneuvers proved that Russia could soon build strategic weapons that could puncture any missile-defense system.

At the time, Col-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, explained that the military tested a "hypersonic flying vehicle" that was able to maneuver between space and the earth's atmosphere.

Military analysts said that the mysterious new weapons could be a maneuverable ballistic missile warhead or a hypersonic cruise missile.

While Putin said the development of such new weapons wasn't aimed against the United States, most observers viewed the move as Moscow's retaliation to the U.S. missile defense plans.

After years of vociferous protests, Russia reacted calmly when Washington withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 in order to develop of a nationwide missile shield. But U.S.-Russian relations have soured again lately, and Moscow has complained about Washington's plans to build new low-yield nuclear weapons.

Just keeps getting better and better. . .

Iraqi defector behind America's WMD claims exposed as 'out-and-out fabricator'

David Kay, the postwar weapons inspector whose declaration in January that Iraq had no WMD initiated a series of hammer-blows to the credibility of the Bush administration and the British government, described Mr Powell's use of Curveball's information before the UN as "disingenuous".

He told the LA Times: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name', I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Mr Powell told the world on 5 February last year the administration had "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails" capable of producing enough anthrax or botulinum toxin to kill "thousands upon thousands of people". He showed "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured. Revealingly, he could only produce artist renditions, not actual blueprints or photographs.

Since the Powell speech, Curveball's reliability has been destroyed. The German foreign intelligence service, the BND, later warned the CIA that it had "various problems with the source". Curveball also lied about his academic credentials and omitted to tell his interlocutors he had been fired as a chemical engineer for the Iraqi army and jailed for embezzlement before fleeing Iraq in the late 1990s.

The possible existence of mobile labs was touted as a theory by UN weapons inspectors frustrated in 1992 at their failure to find evidence of chemical and biological weapons programmes. (Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, later defected and said they had been destroyed in 1991.) The UN inspectors approached Mr CAzaelabi for help in establishing the existence of the mobile labs in late 1997. Scott Ritter, one of the inspectors, told the LA Times: "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff. It looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

Evidence, much of it tentative, trickled in throughout the 1990s that Saddam may have built mobile labs to conceal his weapons programmes. In 1994 Israeli military intelligence indicated that poisons were being made in red and white ice cream trucks and in green moving vans labelled "Sajida Transport" after Saddam's wife. UN inspectors later concluded this information was bogus.

The role of Israeli intelligence in the case for war was the subject of a parliamentary report released in Jerusalem yesterday. An eight-month inquiry resisted the notion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, but lambasted the intelligence agencies for exaggerating Iraqi capabilities, particularly before the war.

Yuval Steinitz, the parliamentarian who led the inquiry, said: "Why didn't we succeed in laying down a broad and deep framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation? That is the central question."

While not as bad as some others I've seen, I must say that it's getting pretty weird out there. Do we really have to see the reemergence of this ugly meme?

There remains a third answer. That the existence of these two great religious totalitarianisms -- one secular only in name and the other religious only in dissimulation -- is required for their mutual defeat. It relies on the observation that both the Left and Islamism react together to produce an extremely toxic combination which neither could have achieved alone. It takes some reflection to remember just how far both the notions of Islamism and Leftism have moved since September 11. The former was an unknown towards which the man in the street would have been indifferent while the latter was a kind of eccentricity, rough yet without danger. Neither will be again. Both have mutated in interaction or perhaps have become that which they really were.

Both are struggling for the space in which conservatism can never go and for the prize which no sane man ever covets: the dominion of souls. Without their mutual presence either could have occupied a kind of cultural sanctuary in which they would brood, proof against interference from people with simple day jobs. Together they guarantee that their places of safety, every media outlet, every school and every place of worship will be transformed into arenas of unparalleled ferocity -- to the possible benefit of the world. Is the Global War on Terror necessarily against the Left? We sAzaell see. We sAzaell see.

Note that this lovely piece is approvingly pointed out by Joe over at the Winds O' Change.

Perhaps a better question is which Left will survive? The anti-fascist Left of Chris Hitchens, Michael Walzer, bloggers like Harry Hatchett and Norm Geras, et. al.? Or the self-hating, self-indulgent Chomskyite strain that now predominates in academia and many NGOs, apologizes for evil, drives people like my colleagues away from the movement, and finds itself increasingly converging with its neo-fascist and Islamofascist counterparts?

To paraphrase Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Well, I heard Mister Katzman blog about them
Well, I heard ol' Joe put them down.
Well, I hope Joe Katzman will remember
A liberal man don't need him around anyhow.

Condi spilling her guts under oath is going to be sweet.

I think there's a growing realization in Washington this weekend that Rice is going to testify, whether she realizes it yet or not. Among several reasons why is the fact that her rationales for not testifying are just becoming more and more visibly bogus, drawing tortured distinctions of no clear constitutional import.

She might just as easily have argued that they have found no record of a National Security Advisor named Rice testifying before congress, or a female NSC Director testifying, or one who served under a Republican president. Each would have made about as much sense. And on top of this you have the fact that the separation of powers argument is questionable at best because the commission itself is not an arm of congress.

5-Minute Video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11

At 9:03 AM on 11 September 2001, the second airplane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center. President Bush was in Florida, at the Emma T. Booker Elementary School, listening to children read. Chief of Staff Andrew Card came over and whispered in Bush's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

A search for Crescent Investment Management results in a wavering "picture" of what the firm actually "is" and "does." It is described as a:

• "New York investment firm that advises several OPEC member nations in the Persian Gulf";[1]

• "New York private equity investment firm focusing on national security technologies";[2]

• "New York-based hedge fund ... which focuses on national security technologies";[3]

• and "oil industry investment firm"[4]

---

1997: Mansoor Ijaz "also acknowledged his commercial interests in effecting a reconciliation between the United States and Sudan. As chairman of Crescent Investment Management, a New York firm that he said handles a $ 2.7 billion investment portfolio—much of it on beAzaelf of Middle East governments—Ijaz said he is particularly interested in new oil field development. Sudan, with moderate reserves estimated at 3.5 billion barrels, is expected to become a petroleum exporter soon and Ijaz said he hopes to manage some of Khartoum's foreign investment of oil profits."

I'm recording the 60 minutes interview with Richard Clarke on DVD for my parents. I'm throwing in this morning's Meet The Press interview with Clarke as well. And I'm going to top it all off with Condi Rice's 60 minutes interview that is happening tonight. I'm mailing this all off Monday to my parent's house.

This DVD of media will arrive about the same time as the copy I sent them of Dick Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror.

It's a stunning thing to watch. And believe me, it will have a stunning effect on my parents. It won't sway them - by any means. But it will provide a strong, sharp blow that will puncture the surety in my mother's belief that Iraq - and Saddam Huessein in particular - was responsible for 9/11 and the previous world trade center bombing. Throw in the Oklahoma City bombing as well - but she's not sure. For my dad, this media barage may be the tipping point.

Well, I guess the old adage is true. Stay long enough in one place and pretty soon you'll see everyone wander by.

Terrorists Don't Need States

Stepping away from the partisan screaming going on these days, the 9/11 commission hearings and—far more revealing—the panel's staff reports paint a fascinating picture of the rise of a new phenomenon in global politics: terrorism that is not state-sponsored but society-sponsored. Few in the American government fully grasped that a group of people without a state's support could pose a mortal threat. The mistake looks obvious in hindsight, but was, sadly, understandable at the time of 9/11. What is less understandable is that this same error persists even today.

How else to explain the vast majority of the polled citizens of the USA who believed that at least one of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi (or didn't know)? I mean, this whole issue is an elephant that's been standing around in the room for at least the past two years and now they're finally getting around to noticing it? After all these lives? After all this money? After all this time?

The Bush team, distrustful of anything Clinton's people said, did not see Al Qaeda as an urgent threat. They held few meetings on it and in other ways were inattentive to it. One example from the panel's report: the senior Pentagon official responsible for counterterrorism is the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Even by September 11, 2001, no one had been appointed to that post.

I asked an American official closely involved with counterterrorism about state sponsorship. He replied, "Well, all that's left is Iran and to a lesser extent Syria, and it's mostly directed against Israel. States have been getting out of the terror business since the late 1980s. We have kept many governments on the list of state sponsors for political reasons. The reality is that the terror we face is mostly unconnected to states." Today's terrorists are harbored in countries like Spain and Germany—entirely unintentionally. They draw on support not from states but private individuals—Saudi millionaires, Egyptian radicals, Yemenite preachers.

Afghanistan housed Al Qaeda, and thus it was crucial to attack the country. But that was less a case of a state's sponsoring a terror group and more one of a terror group's sponsoring a state. Consider the situation today. Al Qaeda has lost its base in Afghanistan, two thirds of its leaders have been captured or killed, its funds are being frozen. And yet terror attacks mount from Indonesia to Casablanca to Spain. "These attacks are not being directed by Al Qaeda. They are being inspired by it," the official told me. "I'm not even sure it makes sense to speak of Al Qaeda because it conveys the image of a single, if decentralized, group. In fact, these are all different, local groups that have in common only ideology and enemies."

It's about time that we started seriously questioning the decidedly ineffective, and in some cases counter productive, state based strategy in the "war on terrorism".

1. Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, 03/22/2004.
2. CNN, 04/30/2001.
3. Bush Was Warned of Hijackings Before 9/11; Lawmakers Want Public Inquiry, ABC News, 05/16/2002.
4. "Top security advisers met just twice on terrorism before Sept. 11 attacks", Detroit News, 07/01/2002.
5. Freedom of Information Center, 05/27/2002.

Special "Bring It On" edition

Seems to be the attack meme from the RWAP, so what the heck.

Kerry Dares GOP to Indict Clarke

if they don't indict him, that just shows their rhetoric is itself a lie. Clarke is supposedly lying about the most crucial issues of national defense under oath. If anything warrants an indictment for perjury, it is that.

So if they don't indict Clarke, either (1) they are lying and Clarke is telling the truth, or (2) they don't really take this national security rhetoric very seriously.

So let's officially start Indictment Watch, Day One. As long as Clarke is unindicted, that means he's telling the truth, even according to the Bush Justice Department.

Update: The stakes get raised.

Richard Clarke, and the Family Steering Committee for the Independent 9/11 Commission have called the White House's bluff. Declassify everything related to September 11th, they say.

Speaking with NPR's All Things Considered Saturday, Clarke called on the White House to declassify everything of his related to September 11th. The link is not available yet but I will get it up when I can.

Meantime, "the Family Steering Committee demands the appearance of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice under oath in a public hearing immediately," the Families said in a statement Saturday.

The week's news in flashcards. Part 1 in a continuing series. . .

The big news this week was the Richard Clarke testimony before the 9/11 committee, as well as his new book which is coming out this week. Even though most of his revelations have been generally known for about 18 months, everyone was shocked! shocked! to come face to face with the now undeniable evidence that the Bush administration has more than a few skeletons in their closet regarding national security.

With Clarke's revelations, Bush's polling numbers took a pounding. The "winged monkey" media attack units fanned out across the nation and still they ended up the week with a lot of rotten tomatoes and cabbage thrown at them.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves

But for better or for worse, and to my mind it's for worse, any President who really wants a war can have one almost any time. Events prove that the Clinton Administration wanted to insert itself into a Balkan civil war a lot more than it wanted to go to war against anti-American terrorists in Southwest Asia. This excuses not a single Bush Administration failing. But let's not kid ourselves about a lost Golden Age of anti-terror vigor.

Not.

You know? It really takes an awful lot of effort doing precisely the wrong thing at each decision point along the way to screw something really major like this.

Cost. Benefit.

I remember at the time Don Rumsfeld running about screaming that he could fight Iraq and N. Korea at the same time with Afghanistan tied behind our back. How brilliant do you have to be to get into three simultaneous wars?

Then what about China and Taiwan? Think China will pass up that opportunity to counter US force by waltzing over while we're otherwise occupied?

Strategic morons.

THE END OF THE TWO-WAR DOCTRINE.

By the time the first bombs dropped over Baghdad a year ago, Kim Jong Il had already gone underground. Reclusive even when there's not a war on, North Korea's oddball dictator didn't venture out in public during the entire month of March 2003. When he finally emerged in early April, many Kim-watchers speculated that he had feared the war in Iraq might be part of a larger U.S. offensive to take down the entire "axis of evil."

The Dear Leader needn't have bothered hiding--the United States couldn't have fought him if it had wanted to. Sure, Kim may have been spooked by the Navy jets running flight operations off the USS Carl Vinson within miles of North Korean airspace. And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made repeated pronouncements that Washington's focus on the Middle East still left plenty of troops for other operations. Yet the military's moves, and the defense secretary's words, were just bluster. Inside the Pentagon, there is a growing realization that fighting two wars with overlapping time frames, the doctrine to which the United States has committed itself for the last eleven years, is now nearly impossible. As one Army official puts it, "The [Pentagon's civilian] policy folks say that our military is large enough to carry out Operation Iraqi Freedom while simultaneously dealing with North Korea. But, if you put that question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they would be pulling their hair out."

This reality has ramifications beyond think-tank symposia and the Pentagon's much-loved PowerPoint presentations. First, backing up diplomacy with the credible threat of force is the coin of the realm for U.S. foreign policy, especially as the United States carries out a global war against terrorism. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein may have doubted America's stomach for regime change, but he couldn't have doubted America's capability to carry it out. Now, however, with the U.S. military tied up in an Iraq mission of indeterminate length, just how credible are implicit U.S. threats to use force in North Korea--threats that give the Bush administration leverage in its negotiations to dismantle Kim's nuclear arsenal?

More important, if the Bush doctrine is to be taken seriously, it is now conceivable--for the first time since the cold war--that the United States might actually have to fight multiple wars simultaneously. True, few at the Pentagon expect a war against North Korea or Iran anytime soon, especially in light of the hardships that America's venture in Iraq has imposed on the nation's military and its relations with allies abroad. Yet the Bush administration's stated goal of "ending state-sponsored terrorism" leaves plenty of potential U.S. military missions in the years to come. During the heady days immediately after Baghdad's fall, some civilian hawks at the Pentagon even suggested sending the tanks west across the border into Syria. So a clear-eyed assessment of what America's military can actually accomplish is hardly just an academic exercise.

13 killed in Iraq battles

U.S. troops and guerrillas armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades fought for hours in the alleyways of Fallujah on Friday. One U.S. marine and at least five Iraqis died, including an ABC News cameraman.

Near Tikrit on Friday, four members of the U.S.-trained Iraqi Civil Defence Corps and three suspected rebels died during a raid by Iraqi security forces and U.S. soldiers, the U.S. military said. Twenty-one suspected guerrillas were captured in the raid north of Baghdad.

Footage from Associated Press Television News showed American troops in Fallujah carrying a comrade on a stretcher shortly after an explosion during combat.

The U.S. military in Baghdad said one marine died and several were wounded in the fighting in a city that has resisted American efforts to pacify it since the ouster of Saddam Hussein a year ago.

This week, U.S. marines took over authority in Fallujah and surrounding areas from the army's 82nd Airborne Division.

The city on the banks of the Euphrates River sits in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where support for Saddam was strong and rebel attacks on American forces are frequent.

Witnesses said heavy gunfire and explosions erupted when marines moved into the centre of the city. In recent months, American troops have rarely ventured into downtown Fallujah, one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq for the U.S. military.

After the fighting, marines patrolled on foot. The city was largely deserted with shops shuttered and residents staying indoors. U.S. troops blocked a city entrance.

I swear: I'm really beginning to suspect that Musharraf is an animatronic attraction programmed by Karl Rove during a late Saturday night coke binge. And like a WestWorld robot, he's popped a fuse and is now completely out of control.

Musharraf vows to eliminate al-Qaeda

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf vowed that he would "eliminate" al-Qaeda and said that the terror networks second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was on the run.

Musharraf spoke during an interview with ABC News, one day after an audio tape -- attributed to Zawahiri -- urged Pakistan's military to support al-Qaeda and sweep Musharraf from power.

"Now as far as if he's taunting me well, I would like to say that Im going to eliminate all of them," he said, referring to Zawahiri and al-Qaeda loyalists.

"I mean, Zawahiri is on the run. For heaven's sake, it's just one tape. Let's not get excited," Musharraf said.

"It's very clear we'll eliminate them, and the tribal elders are cooperating," he added.

The call was made in a tape broadcast by the Arab Al-Jazeera television network late Thursday and attributed to Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri in a recording described by US intelligence as "probably authentic."

The tape called on Pakistan's military to "not obey orders" and overthrow Musharraf's administration, which it calls a "traitor government."

(With apologies to Firesign theatre, We're all Bozos on this Bus)

There's a limit to the rate the public can absorb the information. . . But digest it, they will. And there's eight more months to chew on it.

Clarke's resignation letter

Now it's been said many times, and it's true, that all the monkey dung being flung around the White House not only fails to discredit Clarke, but shows a fundamental worry that Bush's one and only claim to presidential stature is built on a hollow foundation. That's all true, and this certainly hasn't been a good week for the president. But I can't help but feel that the White House has achieved something: they have taken away the shock effect of Clarke's revelations. They drew it into the Clinton/Bush debate about who was more negligent, and into the debate about Clarke's own motives (even though there really is no debate), and in the end, it's just one more confusing pseudo-scandal.

Think about it this way: What if we had learned in November 2001 everything we know now: that the administration had been ignoring and suppressing warnings about terrorism from the very beginning, pushing it aside in favor of other foreign policy issues, and that even after Sept. 11, the president was trying to use it as an excuse to attack Iraq, a country that no one for one second thought was involved.

I don't think we would have even been able to believe it. Even those of us who hate Bush personally, have no trust at all in the people around him or his policies, probably could not have dealt with the thought that the president had not done the best he could to prevent such an attack before September 11, and was dealing with it seriously afterwards. Even when Time came out with basically the same story Clarke is telling, in August 2002, I don't think the press and public was ready to take the idea seriously, since it disappeared almost without notice. (The article is worth reading now; Clarke was obviously a key source, and it shows how much of what seems new this week was actually out there more than 18 months ago. Link above is to an archived copy at someone else's site, the Time version isn't free.) But since then, we've become so inured to the Bush administration's incompetence that the worst thing you could possibly find out sort of ceases to have shock value.

Maybe. The other possibility is that all this information is just too much to take in in a single week, and that it really will slowly bring down the entire edifice.

You can either download these to your favorite MP3 player and listen to 'em while working out in the gym, or you can listen to them streamed over the web. Your choice.

http://www.audible.com/911hearings

Very cool.

Shorter version: If there is any failure here, it is the unforgivable act of keeping Clarke on board, propagating the same failed policies of the Clinton's administration.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt

There are two charges that can be legitimately leveled against George W. Bush. The first is that, in spite of knowing that the Clinton policy on Iraq was ineffective, he neither ended the containment of Hussein nor moved to destroy him. Bush carried on Clinton's policies unchanged. The second charge is that Bush did not increase the level of effort taken to destroy al Qaeda, but essentially followed the Clinton administration's policy of watching and hoping for a low-risk, low-cost moment to act -- a moment that Osama bin Laden was too smart to give them.

In our view, the most serious charge that can be made against Bush is not that he continued -- unchanged -- key Clinton policies before Sept. 11, but that he did not drastically reshape his administration for war after Sept. 11. He left in place the man who was responsible for the failure to understand, locate and destroy al Qaeda under President Bill Clinton and inexplicably left him and others in place, even after his failures became manifest on -- and after -- Sept. 11.

This was, in our view, a serious error in judgment. It may be an unforgivable one. But to hold Bush's eight months in office as having been more responsible for al Qaeda's emergence than Clinton's eight years in office -- not to mention the Carter and Reagan administrations' responsibility for encouraging militant Islam -- strikes us as strange reasoning. Sept. 11 was planned, and it was being implemented while Clinton was president. Bush simply adopted wholesale -- and extended -- Clinton's errors.

Anyone who thinks that Ahmed CAzaelabi's little campaign of false information regarding Saddam Husein's WMDs was limited to Judith Miller should read this surreal bit by Knight Ridder

Summary of ICP product cited in major English-language news outlets worldwide (October 2001-May 2002)
1. Sunday Times (London), May 26, 2002, Sunday, Saddam's men kill 40 in mosque fight. Marie Colvin

2. The Observer, Sunday May 26, 2002, Don’t wag your finger at us, Mr. Bush

3. Agence France Presse, May 22, 2002, Iraq's new Tunis envoy linked to al-Qaeda: opposition

4. Agence France Presse, May 13, 2002, US stepping up contacts with Iraqi opposition groups: paper, WASHINGTON

5. Time, May 13, 2002, Inside Saddam's World; The U.S. likes to portray Iraq's regime as shaky. But TIME's reporting inside Iraq suggests Saddam isn't losing his grip

6. Time, May 13, 2002, WORLD/Inside Saddam’s World; What Saddam's Got, Much of his chemical and biological weaponry remains unaccounted for, and he’s working nukes, by Josh Tyrangiel.

7. Time, May 13, 2002, WORLD/Inside Saddam’s World; "We're Taking Him Out", His war on Iraq may be delayed, but Bush still vows to remove Saddam. Here's a look at White House plans.

Consciously or unconsciously (I suspect the former), Daniel Drezner does a bang up job of trying to put lipstick on the pig of an issue regarding Richard Clarke without appearing to be too much of a political hack:

It's worth remembering that every new administration needs about six months to work out the foreign policy kinks -- flash back to the Clinton team's first six months if you think this is a recent problem. To claim that they were slow to move on Al Qaeda misses the point -- unless it was a campaign issue, every new administration is slow to move on every policy dimension.

Furthermore, as the Washington Post reports, in the end the administration did get this one right, in the form of a September 10, 2001 deputies meeting that agreed upon a three-part, three-year strategy to eject Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. For all of Clarke's accusations about the Bush team's neglect, it's hard to see how things would have changed if this decision had been made a few months earlier. Post-9/11, for all of Clarke's claims about intimidation to show Iraq caused 9/11, the policy outcome was that we ejected the Taliban from Afghanistan. Iraq was put on the back burner. I'm someone who's been less than thrilled with Bush's management of foreign policy. Some of what Clarke says disturbs me, particularly about homeland security. But for this case, it does look like the system worked.

The best thing for this administration is to say in response to Clarke would be: "Yes, if we could turn back time, we'd have given AQ more consideration. But it probably would not have prevented 9/11. And don't claim that we could solve a problem in eight months that the last team -- in which Clarke was the lead on this policy front -- couldn't solve over eight years."

The first is that Clarke makes a HUGE point that he was desperately trying to raise the whole issue to the attention of the President. The outgoing Clinton administration made a HUGE point of trying to tell the incoming administration that their number one problem, number two problem and number three problem was Al Qaeda. And quite simply, he and the rest of the Clinton administration were simply ignored.

And not just simply ignored, but the time that should have been taken up coming up to speed on the issue of terrorism and Al Qaeda in particular was supplanted with the ideas that were left on the back burner in the first Bush administration, such as an anti ballistic missile system. Worse than this distraction with one of the biggest boondoggles on the planet is the OBVIOUS and continuous obsession with Iraq.

So, if it were the case that the incoming Bush administration did not IGNORE the outgoing administration's suggestions, if the incoming Bush administration wasn't preoccupied with a cold war mindset pursuing weapons systems of laughable utility, if the incoming Bush administration wasn't obsessed with Saddam Hussein, THEN Drezner's argument would make sense.

But the facts speak otherwise.

They dropped the ball, Dan. And it wasn't just because they were "coming up to speed". They had a massive tax cut to pass and a conspiracy theory to feed. This administration showed that they had priorities and where they had priorities they could move with devastating speed and effectiveness. They weren't just wandering around the Azaells looking for room numbers, trying to figure out where the meeting rooms were. They were actively ignoring the issue and replacing the mind share with other issues they thought were much, much, MUCH more important than Al Qaeda and terrorism. It was obviously a priority somewhere below tax cuts. A priority way below an ABM system. And a priority far lower than trying to come up with some reason to take out Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda simply wasn't a priority. If it was, they'd have pushed it with as much effectiveness and vigor as they pushed the trillion dollar tax cuts.

Nice try, Dan. I'm pretty darn sure it's a convincing sleight of hand that fools those who are willing to find any reason to be fooled.

But man! You judge a person by the priorities they have. And terrorism - specifically Al Qaeda was NOT a priority. It wasn't any where near a priority. Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts!

And quite frankly, that's a lapse in responsibility. The reason for this was simply the utter contempt the Bush people had for Clinton. And in my book, when you let petty political rivalries and ideological differences cause you to completely and utterly discount what the previous administration tells you should be your top priority, when you let conspiracy theorists run your foreign policy, well. . . I think you have a major problem.

It means that the Bush administration is not putting the job of protecting the American people FIRST. It means that they dropped the ball.

Could 9/11 have been prevented? Who knows? But I tell you this. As we know now, all the information that should have told us it was going to happen was clearly there. And the reason that the dots weren't connected is because no one bothered to pick up the pencil and try.

Worse, they had a preconceived notion of what the picture would be: Iraq.

And when you have a preconceived notion of what the result will be, your decision process is severely flawed. Any first year MBA student knows this.

So put the lipstick on the pig and ignore the obvious, Dan. But any way you slice it, this administration looks like a bunch of amateurs - at best. At worst, they look like a bunch of ideologically driven conspiracy theorists with an agenda that has nothing to do with protecting America from its most dangerous enemies.

And either one, my friend, is inexcusable. This is the PRESIDENT of the United States. Not some silly corporation where a mess up at the executive level has little effect on our safety.

Lance Corporal Andrew Dang was a Combat Engineer in the 29th Battalion of the United States Marine Corps. He was stationed at Camp Pendleton and then was shipped to Iraq just a month or so ago. After serving one year in the military he died Sunday March 21st, 2004 in a town southwest of Baghdad. His platoon was ambushed by an Rocket Propelled Grenade while performing a patrol in his Humvee. Andrew, being the gunner on top of the Humvee, was killed. All others in the vehicle were seriously injured.

I first met Andrew Dang as a high school student in the Aragon Robotics Team that I was mentoring at the time. He was lovingly referred to as our "Pit Monkey" - a title he earned while keeping our robot working between matches. He was the heart of the team. Completely unafraid of any of the cAzaellenges the team faced, he was the first one to roll up his sleeves and actually tackle the problem - quietly and with fierce purpose. The young man I remember had an inborn talent for dealing with mechanical systems and an almost preternatural ability to quickly come to a solution of the complex problems the team faced.

I'm kind of in shock of hearing this - the emotions are running high in my blood right now. This is a young man who was full of promise and had his whole life ahead of him. He was the kind of person that seemed to have endless possibilities laid out in front of him for his choosing and his only problem was picking the ones he wanted to pursue.

I'm not sure what awaits us after we die, but if there is an afterlife I hope that Andrew is up there making the robots of his dreams.

I'm not sure what else to say. At the time I was mentoring the Aragon Robotics Team, the United States was just in the run up to what would then become the Iraq war. I never thought that one of the students I was working with would actually end up in Iraq, much less end up a casualty of this war.

It's hard to type with the tears streaming down my cheeks. This young man's life was just beginning. He was just starting to get a feel for what life was like and now he's gone - never more to warm those around him with his love for life and his talents that will now remain unfulfilled.

Andrew, I'm so sorry that this happened to you. I'm so sorry that your life was taken away from you. I hope you have found peace.

Below is the picture of the 2001-2002 Aragon Robotics Team. Andrew is the second gentleman from the left in the back row (he's kind of in the middle, but I hope you know who I'm referring to). That smile on his face was a constant. As I said, he relished solving problems. It only left him when he was concentrating on solving problems, but it never left his heart.

Andrew, we will all miss you. The hole you leave in our hearts will never be replaced.

Wow. Just watching CNN and it appears that the whole Yassin assassination is having repercussions in Iraq. The riot looks ugly, but there's no way to tell how big it is. . .

Well, I'm finally back and freezing my butt off in Jersey. It was about 55 degrees in Germany - raining, but I'm used to that - when I left and I pop up in Philadelphia and it's 35 degrees with a bitter wind. Yi.

I must say that the difference between European immigration and US immigration is amazing. Europeans are running around with guns and such, and still manage to be amazingly polite and understanding regarding people who've just spent over ten hours on a plane and who don't speak the language. Contrast this with the US customs who are rude and mean to those who have just gotten off a long flight in a daze who DO speak the language.

Amazing.

Look. I know the job sucks. It's rough dealing with the masses of people coming into our country. We're all on edge.

But yelling, screaming and treating EVERYONE like a terrorist isn't helping anything.

It amazes me that these people are the first people that non-Americans meet when they come to this fine country.

BTW, the flight sucked. I was stuck in the middle and my row was the first row near the end where they started compressing the seats together. I was staring at the row in front of me where each seat had two arm rests available to it - a good six inches between each seat. Me? I'm literally crammed into the seat.

Ugh. I hate flying.

Well, I'm leaving the land of the Rhine (I've been in Bonn over the weekend), and I'm off to the US. Have to spend some time in House Harkonnen's New Jersey offices with my boss (memory lane) talking to the troops and organizing various strategies. It'll be fun because they're a great group. But I wish I was back in sunny CA as my wife is going through a rather nasty time. . . We had a heat wave out on the left coast, and at least one of our coy died of oxygen deprivation - when water gets very hot, it holds significantly less oxygen, especially when your filter clogs and cuts down the water recycling. It's just a fish, but my wife has become very attached to them. They come up and eat out of their hand, and she has nursed them from tiny creatures into rather huge beasts (about 14" long or so). Hope the other fish are all right, but I haven't had a chance to talk to her regarding them. . .

Anyways, here's hoping they let me back into our fine country.

Dave Neiwert has a post up detailing a scene at a Fresno anti-war rally that I fear is just a small taste of what is to come in the near future.

These comments were later deleted from the board, along with several responding to the threats.

But I've preserved them here because they encapsulate the right-wing mentality that's floating about out there, stirred up by two years' worth of drum-beating about liberals being traitors and not real Americans, an "evil," as Sean Hannity describes it, on an equal footing with terrorism. The product is a growing eliminationism directed at liberals. The campaign I saw getting its test run in Montana is all primed and ready to go for this summer's presidential campaign.

Last year, in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, we saw an early version of this strategy: Not content merely to hold their own pro-war demonstrations, right-wing radio hosts began inviting their listeners to invade peace rallies, disrupt them, and shout them down. They succeeded in doing so on several occasions. At other times, they did not. Accompanying the campaign was a steady patter of eliminationism and death threats directed at war protesters.

So expect to see a lot more of these kinds of open provocations this coming year: Bush supporters invading and disrupting Kerry rallies; threats of violence directed at anyone supporting the "traitors" and "appeasers"; and eventually, the eruption of actual violence. It's hard to say which side will shoot first (the right-wingers are more likely, since they have the guns, but you never know how these things will play out), but it's looking increasingly like someone's going to get hurt.

Worst of all, it's also looking like law enforcement is going to be part of the problem.

The pressure is only going to increase from here on out, and I fear that both the Democratic and Republican conventions are going to be marred by ugly violence. We are a house divided. The gulf seems unbreachable. We're headed into an election to be judged by Diebold voting machines.

May "Bob" have mercy on us all. . .

Al Qaeda claims to have bought nuclear weapons

Osama bin Laden's terror network claims to have bought ready-made nuclear weapons on a Central Asian black market, the biographer of al Qaeda's No. 2 leader was quoted telling an Australian television station.

In an interview scheduled to be televised Monday, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir said Ayman al-Zawahri claimed "smart briefcase bombs" are available on the black market.

It was not clear when the interview between Mir and al-Zawahri took place.

U.S. intelligence agencies have long believed al Qaeda attempted to acquire a nuclear device on the black market but said there is no evidence they ever succeeded.

In the interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. television, parts of which were released Sunday, Mir recalled telling al-Zawahri it was difficult to believe al Qaeda had nuclear weapons when the terror network didn't have the equipment to maintain or use them.

"Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri laughed and he said: 'Mr. Mir, if you have $30 million, go to the black market in Central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of ... smart briefcase bombs are available,'" Mir said in the interview.

"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs," Mir quoted al-Zawahri saying.

Al-Zawahri's boast would not in itself prove the al Qaeda has actually succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons.

It does, however, show the absolute and utter folly of pursuing a state based strategy against an organization that is stateless. Worse, focussing on the non-existent WMD falling into the hands of those who can clearly purchase them from the black market.

Wonder how much 200 billion dollars we spent on the war with Iraq, not to mention the lives and diplomatic capital, would have done for tracking such crap down and shutting it off?

Most valuable asset

Why do people give up weblogs is interesting reading. I think that the weblogging community is highly self-selective, consisting of people who have lots of free time, have excellent internet access (probably as part of their job), and who either:

1. write well
2. write poorly but don’t know it
3. write poorly but don’t care

Of these 3, it is the second group that bothers me the most. I naturally gravitate towards good writers, they’re easy to pick out of the crowd, and reading them inspires me. And the blowhards who don’t care that they suck at this, they don’t bother me either. But the second group... that’s interesting.

I grew up being taught, believing, and teaching others to believe that there were only two things you needed to do to become a good writer:

1. Read every day
2. Write every day

But now we have thousands of webloggers who read other webloggers every day, and who themselves write every day, and they’re not getting any better at writing. Some people become better writers through weblogging, but if you look around you’ll have to agree that many don’t. They may fancy themselves as writers, or even journalists, because after all they’ve been writing every day for years. But their latest stuff is just as immature and nonsensical as their old stuff. They can’t put words together. (What’s so good about putting words together? It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.)

This bothers me enormously. First, the mind-boggling lack of self-knowledge required to write every day and not realize that you write badly. But more importantly, the fact that there is obviously a secret third ingredient required for becoming a good writer. You need to read every day... and write every day... and X. But I don’t know what X is, and obviously my teachers didn’t know either. They had it, but they didn’t know it. Daily writing is not our most valuable asset. So what is it?

"It's very difficult for incompetent people to know they are incompetent," said David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. "If they could figure it out, they probably wouldn't be."

Dunning, whose research has focused on illusions in human judgment, said that the most incompetent people actually tended to think more highly of themselves than their competent colleagues.

It's sort of a workplace Catch-22: If you think you are incompetent, you probably are not, but if you think you can do no wrong, you almost certainly can and will.

"When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden," Dunning said. "Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."

So, I went to the Neighbor Search page that shows you who your neighbors are donating to in the presidential campaign. I entered in my address and found out that most of my neighborhood is democratic (surprise). However, I couldn't find myself anywhere. I explicitly entered my name and came up blank. Entered only my last name and I still do not appear.

Seeing as how I gave to Dean during the beginning of the primary and now have been giving to Kerry, one would have thought I would have shown up.

The obvious conclusion I can draw from this is that I simply do not exist. This is all a dream. Man. Who would have thought that?

Dennis Miller is a first class ass. Check out this clip of the laughable interview that Eric Alterman subjected himself to. Know you've probably already seen it, but if for some reason you haven't. . .

This is pretty much the canonical example of the right wing in action here.

Sept. 11: Before And After

(CBS) Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Correspondent Lesley Stahl that on Sept. 11, 2001, and the day after - when it was clear al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation.

Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 21 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

"They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

"Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].'"

Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and al Qaeda], but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.

Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

or:

Given that I was abused by hard-core religious types throughout my youth, I've always had an unhealthy interest in religion and it's function in human society. A while back I picked up a rather fascinating book entitled Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Human Society. Given that I was in the midst of working for a startup and other factors in my life, I had read the first few pages and put it on my stack of "Books I Must Read Sometime". Unsurprisingly, this is a very large stack - currently at a record height of over 4 meters, I believe. Yes, I buy a lot of books that I have yet to read - a failing of mine, I'm sure.

In any event, what piqued my interest in this book was the possibility that someone actually had a scientific theory on the evolutionary function of groups - religious, national, social circles, whatever granularity one might care to look at. Also, the means of my gainful employment in today's technological economy has a lot to do with groups. When it comes right down to it, what I actually do for a living is the successful engineering of groups of distributed entities into a coordinated whole which functions synergetically to outperform the sum of their parts. So it's not so strange that this should be an obsession of mine. Anyone who has known me for any reasonable quantum of time quickly finds out that I'm obsessed with groups, group communication, and the organization of groups.

So finding myself on a trip to Germany to visit high profile clients of House Harkonnen, I knew there would be quite a bit of time available to me that I would have to somehow fill. So I grabbed Darwin's Cathedral and stuffed it into my suitcase.

And I must say that I've not been disappointed. This is one of those rare books that expands my mind significantly. One that brings into view new vistas I never dreamed existed.

Counterattack

The fundamental question has been: Is al Qaeda still there -- and is it capable of carrying out further operations? It was obvious that if al Qaeda could carry out operations, it would have to do so now. Its viability was in doubt, and therefore its credibility -- particularly in the Islamic world -- was in decline. It was not a question of support or popularity, but a growing sense that al Qaeda, rather than triggering an Islamic renaissance, had led the Islamic world into a disaster of toppled regimes, regimes cooperating with the United States and a massive foreign military presence casting a shadow over the region. If al Qaeda did not act quickly and decisively, it was going to lose the war. More important than any single action, al Qaeda had to demonstrate that it had a strategy for reversing its fortunes.

The March 11 attack indicates that al Qaeda still exists. It also indicates that al Qaeda has a strategy -- one that strikes at the soft underbelly of the U.S. strategy in the war. The Iraq war succeeded in shifting the behavior of the Saudis and Iranians, albeit by very different routes. The U.S. position in the Islamic world is stronger than before. But the same war created a fault line within nations that worked with the United States in Iraq, as well as between those nations and the United States. Al Qaeda appears to be focusing on that fault line.

I also find the following particularly surreal:

If al Qaeda could generate a process in which non-Islamic U.S. allies were to peel away from the United States, two things would happen. First, the position of the United States in the Islamic world might start to deteriorate. One of the strengths in the U.S. position has been deep divisions in Europe, which left Islamic states isolated from alternative centers of support. If Europe shifted en masse to the Franco-German position, the Islamic sense of isolation and lack of alternatives also would shift. It could -- emphasize could -- undermine the U.S. position in the region.

Second, a massive defection from the United States by allied governments would hurt the Bush administration. One of the charges critics have made against President George W. Bush is that he has followed a unilateralist policy that has isolated him from allies. That criticism has never been true -- most of Europe's governments supported the U.S. policy in Iraq -- but if it becomes true, if reality catches up with perception, then Bush's domestic position would weaken enormously.

On the left is a link that will take you to the site where you can donate to the campaign of John Kerry. I know that money is tight these days, but if we don't contribute, we won't win. Regardless of how things "should be" the simple fact is that MONEY == POWER. And right now, Bush has all the money... er... power.

So go ahead and click on the link and donate whatever you can. Even a few dollars will help - really.

In any event, donating to Kerry will do far more for the effort to kick out the current occupant of the White House than all the reading and writing of angry posts in the entire blogosphere.

DONATE. You'll feel a lot better afterwards.

:)

Via Lerxst

With recent reports that Al Zawahiri may have slipped the net from US and Pakistani forces, we ought to remember the events of Tora Bora and how we let Bin Laden get away because we'd rather have local tribal leaders do the job of U.S. soldiers.

. . .

Add this to the mounting list of failures in Bush's war on terror:

1. The failure to use predator drones for 8 months despite the pleadings of the Clinton Administration.

2. Diverting resources (special ops and translators) from Al Qaeda in invading Iraq

3. Increasing the rolls of terrorists according to the IIIS

4. Leaving stockpiles of small arm weapons for the terrorists in Iraq (also according to IIIS)

5. Disbanding the Iraqi Army leading to chaos and terrorism in Iraq

6. Ashcroft's shifting of intelligence away from counter-terrorism

7. Bush's failure to respond to the Cole attack (the link to AQ was only established after Bush took over)

I am baffled why everyone in this company isn't behind bars and doing hard time.

Check out this footage of a video taken in a closed-door meeting concerning Diebold machines in Texas.

Via the Agonist

Nathan Newman had a post up yesterday which sums up my feelings regarding the horrific attack on Spain and the winning party's subsequent announcement that they're pulling out of Iraq. Know it's an "old" post, but I thought I'd catalogue it here for future reference.

Also, I thought Nathan's post was a clear answer to Laura's recent question regarding the linkage of Iraq and the "war" on terror.

In any event, here's Nathan's post

I'm disappointed that Kevin Drum has joined the chorus that a Spanish vote to end its involvement in Iraq in response to terrorist attacks would be a win for Al Qaeda.

Must we oppose everything Al Qaeda supports, regardless of its merits? That's a recipe for a macho cycle of deliberately promoting global hatred against the West just to spite Al Qaeda.

Bush Did What Bin Laden Wanted: And as someone who believes that Al Qaeda wanted the US to launch its global violence in Islamic countries, all the better to recruit new jihadists, the Bush administration has so given Bin Laden what he wanted by going into Iraq, that it becomes ridiculous to base our votes on "what Al Qaeda wants" rather than deciding what is the best way to end the terror.

Let's face it-- terrorism is designed to put its targets in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If you ignore their demands, especially when those demands reflect broader global social grievances, you just help them recruit new supporters. If you give into the demands, you look weak and might encourage more attacks seeking similar concessions.

So screw the opportunistic response to the attacks themselves.

Do What Makes Sense: If getting out of Iraq was a good idea for Spain before the attacks, they are a good idea after the attacks. And while I'm not for the US abandoning Iraq without a decent attempt to prevent full-scale internal slaughter in our exit's wake, I think Spain and other countries removing cover for our unilateralism is the best way to pressure Bush to create a real international administration of the country.

Al Qaeda won the minute Bush decided to match violence with violence. Since then, global support for the terrorists has risen and support for the US has plummeted.

So in cleaning up after Bush's dance to Bin Laden's tune, we need some hard-headed decisions that ignore opportunistic responses to terrorism but address the fundamentals.

Been watching CNN while I'm trying to decompress from the week I've had here in Germany and I'm hearing that Musharraf believes that Al Qaeda is protecting someone who he claims is a "high value target". Apparently the fighting is fierce. Can't find a link anywhere on the web - even on the CNN site.

Weird.

In any event, it could be that we'll now find out what the answer is to the question: "What will the capture/death of bin Laden do for President Bush?".

Update: CNN is reporting that Pakistan believes it is Al-Zawahiri who they have surrounded.

Received this through email (sent to multiple blogs, obviously).

There has been much attention given to the case of Ms. Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who suffered years of horrific abuse at the hands of her husband, and whose government did nothing to protect her from such abuse, which included repeated rape, severe beatings, knocking windows out with her head, attempting to chop her hands off with a machete, threats and humiliation, sodomy, and beating her unconscious in front of her children. Ms. Alvarado actively sought the protection of her government, but in every instance protection was denied. Ms. Alvarado fled Guatemala and sought safety in this country because she could not find it in Guatemala.

Granting Ms. Alvarado asylum, as recently recommended by the Department of Homeland Security, would protect a very narrow class of women and girls fleeing gender-based persecution. The experience of Canada, which has recognized gender-based persecution as a basis for refugee status since 1993, demonstrates that such recognition does not lead to a proliferation of such claims. Canadian government data reveal that gender-based claims consistently constitute only a tiny fraction of overall asylum claims - never more than two percent of the total - and that such claims have actually declined since 1994.
DHS has done the right thing but now Attorney General Ashcroft has the power to make the final decision on whether or not to grant Rodi-Alvarado asylum.

By granting Rodi Alvarado asylum we will protect a very narrow class of women and girls fleeing the very worst gender-related violence
including: domestic violence, sexual trafficking, sexual slavery, rape, honor killing, coercive family planning, female genital mutilation, and honor killings.

Please visit our web site for additional information or if this story interests you please feel free to link to our action alert urging Attorney General Ashcroft to grant Rodi Alvarado asylum.

Please also see last week's front page story from the NY Times:

"Many battered women are anxiously awaiting the government's final determination. In California, Mrs. Alvarado, who said she fled an abusive husband who had dislocated her jawbone and used her head to break windows and mirrors, said her eyes filled with tears when she learned that domestic security officials had recommended granting asylum to women like her."

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Now the decision is up to AG Ashcroft. Please help.

Take Care,

Cory Smith
Legislative Counsel
Human Rights First
100 Maryland Ave, NE Ste. 500
Washington, DC 20002-5625
Tel: (202) 547-5692 ext. 208
Fax: (202) 543-5999
SmithC@HumanRightsFirst.org

I don't think this is a good sign for Iraq. And this is the direct result of a fraudulent prosecution of the war with Iraq. Lies have consequences. . .

Spanish troops to return from Iraq

WITH the announcement that Spanish troops are to return from Iraq next June, Spanish socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has begun to fulfill one of the promises made during his electoral campaign, and one that probably secured his victory in yesterday’s general elections.

In an interview with the Sur channel, Rodríguez Zapatero said that one cannot bomb a nation "just in case" and that wars should not be organized on the basis of lies.

He was referring to the justification of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction used by London and Washington to invade the country, despite the fact that although their troops invaded this Persian Gulf nation almost one year ago, have still not appeared.

He also urged U.S. President George W. Bush and his ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair to reflect on the subject in order to never again embark on actions of that kind in such a way.

Well, I'm off across the pond on a whirl wind tour of several large customers of House Harkonnen. I haven't been in Europe since 9/11 and given the recent bombings in Madrid, the election upset and the first anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I think it's going to be an interesting time to be over there.

Don't know if I'm going to have more than two brain cells firing, though. Going east is always nasty for my internal clock, and I'm going to be hyped on a large amount of caffeine just to keep me animated. But I hear they have the internet over on that side of the Atlantic, so I'm hoping to blog a little bit while I'm over there.

Not that these guys need another link from me, but this was good.

Up One

This isn't to say that slashing the defense budget to European levels will work either. Because, you see, the defense budget is part of what the rest of the world is paying for when it buys our debt. Protection is a service, and other governments are paying for it. Right now, in specific, Japan is. But this is why it is important for the US to supply the kind of security that our customers - the other nations that buy our debt - want. It is also important to not spend more on defense than it produces in the willingness of other nations to fund our deficit. More spent on defense than is salable comes out of national savings and shows up as real trade deficit.

This is why the Bush unilateralist policy is bad economics - he told our customers, in effect, to go hang. Customers don't like this, and they respond negatively to it.

Hence much of the run away budget effect that is being experienced right now comes from the US spending on Defense unilaterally. This is why the first Iraq war turned a small profit for the US - other nations paid. This is why the second Iraq War did not - other nations weren't buying what we had to sell. This same dispute, by the way, is what cost us in the late 1960's and early 1970's. At a certain point the other nations of the West didn't like how we were handling South East Asia, and in particular they did not like the expansion of the war beyond Vietnam by Nixon. Thus, in two waves, one in Johnson's last year, and one in Nixon's, they stopped paying for what they didn't want.

And late modern war is very expensive - and it puts a lot of money in the hands of people who spend it. Which means that, no surprise, the trade deficit goes up again.

That's the lesson, the US has to be internationalist, because that is the intersection between economic and military security. Which is why making inflated claims to your customers is a bad idea.

Gee. Let's see.

a) Forcing a war down the throat of a population that is 90% against it.
b) Lying to create the illusion of an imminent threat.
c) Completely bungling the occupation because of ideologically driven agendas and beliefs
d) The bitch slapping of anyone who opposed you

Update: For what it's worth, I don't think that Spain is capitulating to Al Qaeda. I'm pretty darn sure they're really pissed about terrorism and are going to be doing quite a lot regarding the issue. The problem is that because we have prosecuted a war under fraudulent terms, and completely bungled the occupation, we have created massive amount of stress with allies we desperately need. It's pretty clear to the rest of the world that the Iraq war was a boondoggle. I'm also convinced that they realize that dealing with terrorism is not an option - it's what they have to do. One can be against the war with Iraq without flinching one bit on the issue of terrorism. Only the pro-war-right can't see that at all.

From Stratfor

I must say that the reaction to the Spanish elections from the pro-war right has completely caught me off guard. It's only because of the bombings that I even knew Spain was having elections - hey, I'm an ignorant American. I didn't realize that the Spanish vote was a fulcrum in the "War On A Noun".

However, it's almost surreal to see the bitter invective dripping with obvious disdain for the Spaniards who had the gall to vote Socialist in Sunday's election. The patronizing wagging of fingers and the lecturing seems to be in full bloom.

See? Millions of Spaniards flunked the test. They're all objectively pro Al Qaeda because they didn't believe the obvious spin by Aznar - you know, the guy friendly to us - and cast their vote for George Bush.

And must I say that Tacitus' linkage of Afghanistan and Iraq is the most blatant use of begging the question I've seen in a while? I think so.

You have to admire the whole patronizing post, though. He is a darn good writer.

But "Tsk, Tsk, Tsk" doesn't hold much water any more. Especially when served in a leaky cup of fallacious logic.

No Al Qaeda connections to Iraq. No WMDs. Nothing more than High School science fair level WMD programs.

Lives. Time. Money. Credibility.

All wasted in this Red Herring formerly known as the Iraq war.

Watch the trailer online.

Revolution on Internet Time

What happened was that there was a fundamental shift - instead of the government talking to a mass through the channel of the media - the public took over the conversation. With a mass rally, with their own communication networks, and with the ability to find the truth - and organize around that truth.

In the US we are used to an "internet versus the press" stance - where much of the reason people come to the internet is to avoid the clear bias of so many press outlets. Outlets which buried stories which are now only coming to light, and which for months dutifully recited how a recovery was underway, even though the underlying data did not support it. In Europe the relationship is different - the public and the press have a far less adversarial relationship, and the result is that communication tools given to individuals are not used to produce a "counter press" but to amplify the message and turn it into almost instant action.

In the US we are, likewise, very "wire" heavy in our communications - where as in Europe the internet is reached through the cellphone as much as the laptop. The internet is not about heavy articles or even links - but about text messages and message groups - the old phone tree on internet time. Thus, the internet is lighter, smaller, faster, and more intergrated to a public which lives in public. In Europe, the people go armed with their internet.

Consider that the demonstrations of March 12th had almost a quarter of the Spanish population participating - that would be the equivalent of 70 million people in the US. Consider how chants were spread around the country in hours. The paradigm of American internet politics, that the internet is a way around a disfunctional press and political system, does not apply here. Instead, it forms the roll of giving an organizational power which does not rely on central hierarchies to make visible and immediate and coherent the public response to events.

I'm just saying. . .

Interview with Mel Gibson’s dad teaches strange ‘lessons’ on life

I learned a lifelong lesson during my recent interview with Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson. The interview took place on the eve of the release of Mel Gibson’s new movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”

I learned that there actually were no concentration camps during the Holocaust, only work camps.

I learned that the Holocaust was a fiction, a fabricated business tool used strategically to siphon hard-earned money from the coffers of innocent governments worldwide.

I learned that there are too many survivors left in the world for there ever to have been a Holocaust.

I learned that the Jews just walked off the plazas of Europe right onto the streets of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Sydney and Los Angeles. In fact, I learned that the Germans were such an efficient people that if they had wanted to murder 6 million people, well then by golly they would have done it!

But this was only the beginning of my education.

I learned from Hutton Gibson that every generation of Jews aspires toward global dominion through one world religion and one world government. I learned that the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans all were international Jewish bankers whose lifelong plot was to control the U.S. economy.

I learned that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, as ringleader of this economic band of brothers, should be hanged.

I learned that America must be violently overthrown and that all states must secede from the union.

I learned that “Japs” who died in ferocious battles during World War II simply were fools and human waste to be cleared off the front line like disposable trash each morning.

I learned that the Vatican has been under Jewish and Masonic control since 1965. And I at last learned the answer to a question that has troubled me since birth: The pope, in fact, is not Catholic; he is Jewish.

I learned that when “The Passion of the Christ” was screened at the Vatican, the pope was considered nothing more than a “hostile witness” and a “dumb ass,” for he obviously could do only one thing upon viewing the film: endorse it.

Thanks for the memories

No doubt there's going to be a lot of journalistic chatter about whether it's right to protest during a war. Already the elected Democrats are unified in their silence regarding criticism. Media personalities and corporations are making statements about their policy of criticism during war time. Statements of admitted self censorship.

Let's just be blunt and say if we're marching into Baghdad victorious with roses showering the troops, democracy flowers in the middle east and Israel and Palestine are economically cooperating powerhouses living in peace there isn't going to be a single charge leveled against anyone. We'll have a 100 year reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis and no one will be able to defeat them politically.

So, it should be useful for all citizens of the United States of America to stop for a moment and list three or four measurable things your expecting to see get better or worse. Maybe if our crack journalists looking for blog fill or something else can start coming up with a list of things we can start gaging the success or failure - or 90 degree optimal outcome of an orthogonal vector Hilbert space of doom, super complex thing-a-majigy - of this thing called the War with Iraq.

So here are three of mine.

First, on March 17, 2004 - a year from now - our Terror Threat Level better be on fucking serene white. If a year from now we're still on piss yellow or scared shitless orange Terror Threat Level, then I'd say the Administration sold us a bill of goods. Quite simply, this war of choice - a preemptive war - hasn't made us any safer. If the Terror Threat Level isn't on Economy is Booming pink on March 17, 2005 - two years from now - I'm thinking we're in the toilet and the Administration put us there.

Second, one year from now, if Iraq is essentially the same security state as Palestine is under Israel today we have a 10 year occupation on our hands. If we still have troops fighting, suicide bombers and all the trappings of modern day Palestine, the critics of this war with Iraq are right. The administration has sold us a bill of goods that we were going to paying for decades from now - occupation of chaos is costly both in dollar terms and lives lost.

Third, if we haven't found any credible evidence of WMD, nefarious connections with Al Qaeda, rape rooms and baby killing factories a year from now, we've been sold a bill of goods. By credible, I mean independently verified. I think the US should take it upon themselves to bring in UN investigators and monitors to ensure that all revelations and facts are verified. We've seen the finest US intelligence agencies and US state department fooled by amateur forgeries, RC model "WMD delivery vehicles" made out of duct tape and weed whackers, as well as Aluminum tubes not as suspicious as we were told. So anything we won't let Hans Blix verify the validity of, I claim is too suspect for evidence in satisfaction of this criteria - either way.

So, I say let the bones roll as the die is already cast. Here's my criteria in a thumbnail. What's yours?

If you don't have one until after the fact, you're just a historian.

Iraq Electrical Power (August, 2003)

As of late July 2003, indications were that Iraq had no more than perhaps 3,600 MW of power generating capacity, well below the amount needed to satisfy peak summer demand. Baghdad alone is estimated to require 2,400 MW of power during the summer's extreme heat for refrigeration and air conditioning, but was receiving perhaps Azaelf that amount. The Doura plant, which supplies the capital, was only running at 30% capacity as of late July, while power lines between the Beiji facility, which also serves Baghdad, had been cut or looted. Overall, according to Paul Bremer, Iraq requires an extra 2,000 MW of generating capacity in order to meet demand, at a cost of perhaps $2 billion. In the meantime, the CPA has introduced a rationing system for the entire country, except for Basra, with three hours on and three hours off. Key facilities like hospitals, oil facilities, water and sewage plants were to receive power 24 hours a day under the plan.

Around 85%-90% of Iraq's national power grid (and 20 power stations) was damaged or destroyed in the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Existing generating capacity of 9,000 megawatts (MW) in December 1990 was reduced to only 340 MW by March 1991. In early 1991, transmission and distribution infrastructure also was destroyed, including the 10 substations serving Baghdad and about 30% of the country's 400-kilovolt (kV) transmission network. In early 1992, Iraq stated that it had restarted 75% of the national grid, including the 1,320-MW Baiji and Mosul thermal plants as well as the Saddam Dam. The U.N. Iraq Program estimated in November 2002 that Iraq's generating capacity was 4,300-4,400 MW. The U.N. Iraq Program further stated that, by the summer of 2004, Iraq's generating capacity could reach 5,900 MW, with several power stations (Al-Quds, Beji, Himreen,Yousfiya, Rumaila -- all gas-fired) under construction and several others (Dibs, Hart, Najaf, Nassriya -- gas and thermal) awaiting approval and/or funds.

Prior to the war, Iraq reportedly had signed contracts for renovating two generation units at the Harithah power plant, and another to rebuild the Yusufiyah plant, which stopped operating in 1990. Iraq's Electricity Authority reportedly also had signed several other contracts with Chinese, Swiss, French, and Russian companies, to build 3,000 MW of additional power generating capacity. In December 2000, it was reported that a Chinese company had completed work on the Abdullah power plant north of Baghdad. In October 2001, it was reported that Russia's Mosenergomontazh was working to modernize Iraq's Southern Heat and Power Plant in Najibia, Basra province. The project aims to add 200 MW of generating capacity to Iraq's grid. In August 2002, the Najaf governate in southern Iraq announced that two new power plants, with a combined capacity of 20 MW, had come online.

Socialists Declare Victory Over Ruling Party in Spain

In other related news, Officials start to shift blame to al-Qaeda.

Let's be quite frank. If we hadn't spent the last two years prosecuting an illegal war in Iraq, we could have spent the hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of soldiers who have died so far, and the lives of those injured, not forgetting the disruption to the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who are currently trying to hold Iraq together long enough to save GW's reelection bid tracking down these bastards and breaking their organization's collective back.

It's one thing to do something that isn't quite in line with the immediate problem. But JHCORFC. A whole war against a tin cup tyrant who couldn't even threaten Jordan?

George Bush is the biggest threat to the security of the world. He is not simply fumbling about in the dark, ignorant of what to do. The people who ran this whole charade are conspiracy theorists of the worst type. They are spending another BILLION dollars still combing Iraq for the umpteenth time looking for a "scrap" of evidence that they can hold up to show the world they were right after all.

Meanwhile, the gang of thugs known as Al Qaeda are running around the world blowing the shit out of train stations.

It's a matter of priorities, don't you think?

Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save America's Middle Class

Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't had the time to study both economics and history:

1. There is no such thing as a "free market."

2. The "middle class" is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering).

The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System in the Twelfth Century. It's widely believed by those in power, those who cAzaellenge it are branded heretics and ridiculed, and it is wrong.

In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." Markets are the creation of government.

The efficient market system came about as the result of government practices - not despite them.

So all you out there who think that government is the problem not the solution are pretty much living in a fantasy world that simply just doesn't fit the facts.

I believe in efficient government and minimal laws - I completely understand that over regulation and burdensome and complex regulations are just as big a problem as the lack of laws and no regulation. It's all about balance. Bad law can be just as bad as no law. Duh.

But when your base belief is to have NO laws, NO taxes, NO regulations - well, then I'm just going to shake my head and wonder when our species is going to evolve beyond this silly desire for a feudalistic society.

But conservative economics - the return of ancient feudalism - rose up after Lincoln's death and reigned through the Gilded Age, creating both great wealth and a huge population of what today we call the "working poor." American reaction to these disparities gave birth to the Populist, Progressive, and modern Labor movements. Two generations later, Franklin Roosevelt brought us out of Herbert Hoover's conservative-economics-produced Great Depression and bequeathed us with more than a Azaelf-century of prosperity.

But now the conservatives are back in the driver's seat, and heading us back toward feudalism and serfdom (and possibly another Great Depression).

Only a return to liberal economic policies - a return to We The People again setting and enforcing the rules of the game of business - will reverse this dangerous trend. We've done it before, with tariffs, anti-trust legislation, and worker protections ranging from enforcing the rights of organized labor to restricting American companies' access to cheap foreign labor through visas and tariffs. The result was the production of something never before seen in history: a strong and vibrant middle class.

If the remnants of that modern middle class are to survive - and grow - we must learn the lessons of the past and return to the policies that in the 1780s and the late 1930s brought this nation back from the brink of economic disaster.

Sick, afraid, defiant - they marched in their millions

Then, slowly, thousands began to congregate in squares, unfurling banners begging "We don't want to die" and "Death to ETA", "Peace not terrorism". As the thousands multiplied into a million, and then two, Madrid knew it was witnessing the biggest mass-protest in Spanish history.

At first, the worst thing was the silence. The loudest, most raucous city in Europe - famous for its working class which never draws breath and always there with an opinion - was suddenly mute.

"There are no words to describe this," was the answer from the cleaners at the station, the Italian woman in furs at the bus-stop.

Language had failed everyone. The city had been up all night trying to make sense of it in darkened living rooms. People looked drawn, gaunt, scowling, afraid. "I've never seen us look like this," said an insurance inspector. "So tense, so goddamn furious, looking left to right, hunching over and walking straight ahead."

Origin of Species

I am a poster child for the "One more reason not to do drugs" campaign

Profuse apologies to Atrios as well as D² and apologies to B³ for my abuse of the form.

White House Sends Senior Official to Iraq

Last month, the Bush administration thought it had come up with a viable alternative by proposing to bring the United Nations back in, only to see a minority of council members stall -- partly in a bid to give the United States no choice but to hand over power to the current council, U.S. and coalition diplomats said.

"We definitely think the United Nations has an important role to play," said a senior administration official involved in Iraq policy. "Many Iraqis on the Governing Council agree with that, but some on the council don't for a variety of reasons."

The power dynamics are rapidly changing as the occupation moves into its final phase. The closer the transition gets to June 30, the more leverage council members feel they would have -- and the weaker they believe the coalition would be in forcing them to comply, U.S. officials say. The problem is already being referred to by administration officials as "June 30-itis."

Ironically, U.S. officials noted, the United States is now more in sync with the United Nations on the steps necessary for the transition than it is with some members of the Governing Council.

With less than four months left in the occupation, the United States wants U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to return to Iraq within two or three weeks to discuss how to form a new government. The approach favored by the United States is to enlarge the Governing Council by adding members to be selected by a "roundtable meeting" or, in Arabic, a shura of Iraqis outside the council who are not viewed as surrogates of the U.S.-led coalition, U.S. officials said.

"Brahimi's ready to go back as soon as he's invited," said a senior State Department official familiar with the standoff.

But, now, at least five Shiite members of the Governing Council are reluctant to give the United Nations a management role, U.S. officials said. The main reason is concern that they might either lose their jobs or see their power diluted as new members are added. Some Shiite members also did not like the tone of Brahimi's report last month that was implicitly critical of the council, U.S. officials said.

"Bremer has been talking to the Iraqis about getting the United Nations back. It would be good if the Iraqis would ask the U.N. to help out. They haven't done it yet, so we continue to talk to them. Bremer's got his hands full," the senior State Department official said.

But the United States also wants the Iraqi council to invite the United Nations to take the lead in organizing Iraq's first national elections, due to be held by year's end, according to a new interim constitution signed last week. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has stipulated that Iraq must make a formal request and has noted that time is running out.

A preliminary U.N. assessment last month estimated that preparations -- for a census, voter registration, civic education, party formation, candidate selection, campaigning and a vote -- would take at least eight months. To meet its own deadline, the United Nations would have to be ready to operate in Iraq by the end of April, seven weeks away.

The world body currently has no diplomats in Iraq. Two suicide bombings at its Baghdad headquarters, in August and October, killed about two dozen staff members, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. Just getting up and running could take several weeks, U.S. officials and envoys from coalition countries say.

Daniel Drezner presents the standard defense for anything that people seem to get pissed off about in our globalized economy.

A common meme from those who blast offshore outsourcing is that it's driven by rapacious firms eager to maximize short-term profits. This raises an interesting question -- what if consumers are the ones driving offshoring?

A question to those who oppose offshore outsourcing -- should this expansion of consumer choice be banned or restricted?

If so, what other limitations should be placed so this sort of thing doesn't happen? Eliminate Wal-Marts? Japanese auto imports?

In other words, to what extent is the outcry over outsourcing a slippery slope to policies designed to block all forms of trade and technological innovation?

. . .

Just to be clear, even though I've defended offshore outsourcing as a good thing, I have no problem whatsoever with this kind of marketing strategy. If consumers prefer to pay higher prices in return for the satisfaction of buying American, that's fine. Consumer choice should not be restricted in either way.

The problem I have with the philosophy expressed here is the underlying belief that a pack of consumers can always make the correct choices. Knowing what we know about human behavior, we understand that humans are particularly poor at balancing the long term vs. the short term. And then there's the whole "tragedy of the commons" thing.

The point being that just because people like it and buy it doesn't mean it's always good for them. Didn't we just have a media blitz about how overweight America is? Wasn't there something about obesity and weight problems overtaking smoking as the number one health problem in the USA?

It isn't extremely hard to find a plethora of similar examples in pretty much every area of consumerism - especially in America. And it's a pretty hard to defend such choices. Yea, it's ultimately the individual's responsibility. But regulation of choices is part of being in a society.

The question is really what we want to do in the long run. And while I'm largely sympathetic to the basic ideals of Libertarian economics, I'm pretty clear that we live in a world where humans will likely make the wrong choice most of the time. The facts are inescapable, and to argue otherwise is simply to live in a libertarian utopia and completely ignore undeniable facts of human nature.

Dan asks if there is any ideas for dealing with outsourcing other than by "eliminating Walmarts and Japanese imports". Which seems kind of funny because while Walmart is an excellent example of the problems of outsourcing, Japanese imports are not. The Japanese, if one will remember, did a bang up job of opening up auto manufacturing plants in the United States. This was done because of the backlash of Americans which forced the politicians to craft a series of incentives and penalties which prompted the Japanese to share some of the wealth they were getting from our rich consumer market. I think it worked out pretty well. So do the Germans (BMW is another example). So do a lot of people.

I think what we need to examine is what are the incentives we're giving to businesses like Walmart and other places - like hi-tech - where outsourcing seems to be a concern.

I mean, these huge companies don't operate in a vacuum. They have highly trained and well paid humans who interact with the governments here in the United States on a daily basis. Lobbying Senators, Congresspersons, State Governors and town mayors. All the frickin' time.

Part of the reason why Walmart's prices are so low is that we - the actual people of the US in the form of our various governments - give Walmart a lot of benefits in the area of tax breaks, friendly regulatory laws, etc, etc, etc. Perhaps it's time we re-evaluated some of this special treatment and actually see if they make sense in the new economic environment.

I think it's a terrible idea to impose yet another regime of restrictions to free trade just to offset all the advantages we're giving to these companies. That kind of policy just doesn't make sense.

Far better to take away the perks, benefits and other advantages we're giving these companies in the first place. The action is well targeted and focused. Other companies in the same space (say Target, K Mart, etc) would then be on a far more competitive footing with the Walmarts of the world.

In any event, I think we need to start looking more at the incentives that already exist in our economic policy.

Take away the carrot and the stick may not even be necessary.

Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

Don't mention the war

On the fundamental issue of intervention many of these critics cannot argue with Blair, because they fully accept the premise of his international mission to cure the world's ills; they support Western intervention.

Some of the leading critics of invading Iraq were full-on cheerleaders of Blair's earlier wars. Robin Cook, who resigned as Labour Leader of the House of Commons over Iraq, was foreign secretary during Blair and Clinton's Kosovo war of 1999; Clare Short, who resigned as secretary of state for international development shortly after the war in Iraq, was a leading spokesperson for the Kosovo war. 'This is a cAzaellenger for our generation. We must do what is right otherwise evil will triumph', said Short of invading Kosovo (4). The debate about Iraq tends towards the technical, towards clashes over issues of legality and timing, because on the bigger political question there is no disagreement between the pro- and anti-war camps.

Indeed, Blair sought to exploit these points of agreement in his speech at the end of last week. He evoked memories of recent wars that won the support of many of those kicking up a stink over Iraq. 'Kosovo, with ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians, was not a hard decision for most people', he said. 'Nor was Afghanistan after the shock of 11 September, nor was Sierra Leone.' In an attempt to silence the spats, Blair played a trump card against his critics: humanitarianism. '[T]he notion of intervening on humanitarian grounds has been gaining currency', he said, locating the war against Saddam's regime within the humanitarian ethos. With the WMD claims rubbished and the legality of the war cAzaellenged, Blair fell back on humanitarianism - aware that wars launched on 'humanitarian' grounds have won the backing, and active support, of many of those raising technical issues about Iraq (5).

What is missing from these debates is politics. Instead there are endless discussions of UN resolutions, WMD, David Kelly's suicide, whether the war was legal, illegal, 'semi-legal'. The debate over Iraq has been reduced to an evidence-based dissection of everything but the war, where neither side is prepared to offer a political or moral defence or critique of the invasion. The pro-war lobby says Saddam had to go because he was in breach of UN resolutions 678, 687 and 1441, the anti-war lobby says the war wasn't legal enough for its liking, while Blair tries to shut them all up by uttering the h-word.

It's time we mentioned the war. The war should be opposed because it was wrong in principle, and a disaster in practice. Organising the world around the principle of intervention, where powerful states can override the sovereignty of other states, is a recipe for global instability and future conflict. In practice, the war created a political vacuum in Iraq, giving rise to widespread violence and uncertainty; outside intervention always exacerbates tensions rather than resolving them, storing up division and conflict for the future. In my political view, this means the war was wrong even if it was legal, even if it had the support of every single member state at the UN, and even if Saddam had a palace-full of nukes. Now who wants to debate that?

On the heels of the stunning revelation today that vows of abstinence get broken at the first opportunity (without a condom, 'natch), I found the latest bit in the Steve Aftergood's secrecy news strangely related. The mental processes which prescribes random drug tests, relies on vows of abstinence as birth control, and still believes that lie detectors actually work all seem the same to me.

Anyways, here's Steve.

THE POLYGRAPH VS. NATIONAL SECURITY

As a technology for counterintelligence security screening, the polygraph has been a spectacular failure. It is hard to recall the last time that polygraph screening uncovered an actual spy, and easy to think of spies who had no difficulty escaping its clutches.

But U.S. government polygraph policy continues to penalize innocent individuals, and those who presume to cAzaellenge that policy.

Alan P. Zelicoff, a distinguished physician and expert on biological weapons arms control, was driven to resign his position as Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories last year as a consequence of his outspoken criticism of polygraph testing.

For his diverse technical contributions, Zelicoff had been awarded Sandia's Meritorious Achievement Award on several occasions as recently as 2002.

But after publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post last year criticizing the Lab's polygraph policy, he was suspended and accused of "insubordination."

Zelicoff was banned from working on a counterterrorism software tool he had invented to facilitate rapid reporting of disease outbreaks. When he continued to speak out on the polygraph, he was suspended a second time. Finally, he quit.

The polygraph won, but the Lab, and the nation that turns to it for scientific expertise, lost.

"As the only senior [Sandia] scientist who had also practiced medicine, I knew that continuation of polygraphs was going to be a disaster for individuals at Sandia and elsewhere in the DOE complex," Dr. Zelicoff wrote recently. "And indeed it was."

See his account of the episode in "The Polygraph Vs. National Security," March 11, here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/zelicoff.pdf

Convicted spy Aldrich Ames offered an impudent but rather perceptive commentary on the polygraph in this 2000 letter he wrote to FAS from Allenwood federal penitentiary, where he is
incarcerated:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/ames.html

In recent years, CIA polygraph examiners have added a new question to their standard exam, which is also asked in some official background investigations: Do you have friends in the media?

Wow. The CS Monitor has a great article up gathering up the various links regarding all the crap flying about with respect to the Iraq war. . .

CIA 'wildly inconsistent' about policing Iraq claims

Some of my favorites

US Senator Ted Kennedy (D) of Mass. called into question the sharp difference between CIA statements that there was no imminent threat from Iraq and comments from President Bush about the "grave" and "unique and urgent" threat posed by that nation.

"You can't have it both ways, can you, Mr. Tenet?" Kennedy said. "If you're saying that there was no immediate threat and you hear either the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense using that super-heated rhetoric, we have to ask, what is your responsibility?" Tenet replied, "I have a responsibility. I lived up to my responsibility." Tenet said that when he was aware that a senior administration official exaggerated the Iraqi threat, he took action internally.

. . .

The Cinncinnati Enquirer reports that US Sen. Jim Bunning (R) of Kentucky rebuked Tenet during a Wednesday morning conference call with Kentucky reporters. "Knowing what I know about George Tenet, he is covering his ass," Mr. Bunning said. "I'm sorry, but that's the way I've felt about him the last 10 years." Bunning called for Tenet to be replaced as soon as possible.

. . .

George A. Lopez and David Cortright, writing in the Boston Globe, say it's time to stop asking about why Washington saw "weapons that weren't there" and look into why "a plethora of publicly available information on the destruction and deterioration of Iraq's weapons capability [from the United Nations and others] was not processed into the equation about the scope of Iraqi firepower."

. . .

Fred Kaplan writes in Salon that CAzaelabi is loyal to just one cause: his own ambition.

CAzaelabi has amassed a fair amount of power he would like to preserve. In Newsweek, Christopher Dickey reports the staggering array of positions that CAzaelabi has come to control within the Governing Council. He is head of the economics and finance committees, which oversee the ministries of oil, finance, and trade, as well as the central bank and several private banks. He also runs the De-Baathification Commission, and thus – if he manages to hang on to the post – holds potentially vast control over the flow of personnel into, or out of, any future Iraqi government.

In Rebuff to Bush, Senate Raises Bar for Tax Cuts

he Senate dealt a surprising election-year rebuke on Wednesday to the White House goal of new tax cuts as it narrowly backed a new rule to require at least 60 votes to approve any tax cuts in the next five years.

Four Republican senators — Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine — joined Democrats in the 51-to-48 vote.

Mr. Bush has called on Congress to make permanent his tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the decade. Republicans in Congress had already sidestepped action on his request this year, in an election campaign in which voters are concerned about the $478 billion budget deficit.

But under the amendment approved on Wednesday night, any tax cuts — or spending increases — in the next five years will require 60 votes for approval in the Senate, unless supporters are able to find spending cuts or other tax increases to make up for the money that would be lost, said Senator Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who sponsored the amendment.

First, though, the Senate would have to approve the budget resolution that is being debated. Then, Mr. Feingold said, his provision would have to be accepted at the conference committee, where House and Senate budget writers try to reconcile differences in their proposals. The Senate is expected to vote on its $2.4 trillion budget resolution by the end of the week. The House Budget Committee is scheduled to consider its proposal on Thursday.

"The taxpayers of this country are desperate," Mr. Feingold said, "and I think people are going to find out that the taxpayers are frustrated and that they are figuring out that the deficit is completely out of control."

His amendment, he added, helps put Congress on the "long hard road to balancing the budget."

Mr. Feingold said senators faced enormous pressure from Republican leaders to vote the other way, but he predicted that the House would be "sensitive" to the issue and that "we have a shot in conference."

The new rule, Mr. Feingold added, is similar to provisions adopted in the 1990's that brought "fiscal discipline and a balanced budget" by the end of that decade.

Senate Republican leaders and White House officials fought efforts to adopt a so-called pay-as-you-go rule. On the Senate floor on Wednesday night, the Budget Committee chairman, Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, argued that accepting the plan could imperil extensions of three popular tax cuts that expire this year. They are ending the so-called marriage penalty, expanding the 10 percent tax bracket and keeping the child tax credit at $1,000 a year.

Now that Mr. Feingold's amendment has passed, those three cuts will need 60 votes to be extended this year, unless money can be found to offset their projected $80 billion cost over five years. In debate on the floor, Mr. Feingold said he and many other Democrats would vote for them, and he assured senators that their passage was not in doubt.

Mr. Nickles, who is retiring after this year, acknowledged that the vote was a defeat, but he refused to speculate on how it could affect future efforts to extend or make permanent the tax cuts that expire in 2011.

"I don't want to go there," he said.

Via Warren Zevon

Roland was a warrior from the Land of the Midnight Sun
With a Thompson gun for hire, fighting to be done
The deal was made in Denmark on a dark and stormy day
So he set out for Biafra to join the bloody fray

Through sixty-six and seven they fought the Congo war
Fingers on their triggers, knee-deep in gore
For days and nights they battled the Bantu to their knees
They killed to earn their living and to help out the Congolese

Roland the Thompson gunner...
Roland the Thompson gunner...

His comrades fought beside him - Van Owen and the rest
But of all the Thompson gunners Roland was the best
So the CIA decided they wanted Roland dead
That son-of-a-bitch Van Owen blew off Roland's head

Chorus: Harmony:

Roland the headless Thompson gunner
Roland the headless Thompson gunner
(Time, time, time
For another peaceful war
Norway's bravest son
But time stands still for Roland
'Til he evens up the score)

They can still see his headless body stalking through the night
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun

Roland searched the continent for the man who'd done him in
He found him in Mombassa in a barroom drinking gin
Roland aimed his Thompson gun - he didn't say a word
But he blew Van Owen's body from there to Johannesburg

Roland the headless Thompson gunner...
Roland the headless Thompson gunner...
Roland the headless Thompson gunner...
The eternal Thompson gunner, still wandering through the night
Now it's ten years later but he still keeps up the fight
In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley
Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun
And bought it