U.S. Military Pays For Propaganda In Iraq

In a development that is only surprising in that it is being reported by a mainstream media outlet, the U.S. military has been paying Iraqi newspapers and radio stations to run stories favorable to the occupiers.

Today's Los Angeles Times details the propaganda program, traditionally a covert action conducted by the CIA, being handled by an outfit called "Lincoln Group" under contract to the Defense Department.

In a nice touch:

Underscoring the importance U.S. officials place on development of a Western-style media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the country's great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein. The hundreds of newspapers, television stations and other "free media" offer a "relief valve" for the Iraqi public to debate the issues of their burgeoning democracy, Rumsfeld said.

The DOD apparently failed to clear this with the adults:

The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military's credibility in other nations and with the American public.

"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media.

Perhaps the most important reason this operation is screwed up is:

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon's efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably "bleeds" into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

No wonder the wingnuts think we are winning.

One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the American military was planting articles.

No shit, Sherlock. The strong pro-U.S. message in some U.S. news stories made me suspect the same thing.

One of the brass comes through with the understatement of the day:

"Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq.

Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, Lincoln Group this year won a major contract with U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert with special operations troops stationed around the globe. The contract is worth up to $100 million over five years, although U.S. military officials said they doubted the Pentagon would spend the full amount of the contract.

Disclosure: The Effwit Group conducts similar operations at about one-fifth of Lincoln Group's cost to the taxpayers.

New Recipe For Success: "Quick, Deadly Strikes by U.S. Warplanes"

Seymour Hersh has published a new article in which he discloses a new strategic plan being bandied about by a "high level Pentagon war planner."

The strategist says the Pentagon envisions drawing down the troop level, and filling any operational gaps left by increasing the use of combat aircraft.

Haven't these people studied the Vietnam War? This was exactly what the U.S. did when Congress, by means of the purse-strings, forced the military to remove American ground forces.

The reliance upon airpower alone didn't ensure victory for the U.S. in Indochina.

In the case of Iraq, an urbanized country, collateral damage from a stepped-up bombing campaign would likely cause seriously detrimental ramifications to the national interests of the United States. However, if the national interests of the U.S. were a vital concern to the Bush administration, we would never have gone to war in Iraq at all.

The kooks are clearly still making policy:

“We're not planning to diminish the war, Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson's views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting--Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield."

He continued, "We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004. The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win," he said. "As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we'’re set to go. There's no sense that the world is caving in. We're in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message." One Pentagon adviser told me, “"There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don't think the President will go for it —until the insurgency is broken. “He's not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics."

Hersh's piece focuses in on Bush's philosophical position in the deliberations:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President'’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq.

The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that he'’s the man, the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his re-election as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

Bush comes across here as the type of rational leader our nation needs in trying times:

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: I said to the President, We'’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, Are we losing? I said, ‘Not yet. The President, he said, “appeared displeased with that answer. “I tried to tell him, the former senior official said. And he couldn'’t hear it.

(...)

The President is more determined than ever to stay the course, the former defense official said. He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage People may suffer and die, but the Church advances. He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush'’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House, the former official said, “but Bush has no idea."

The president's management skills, Harvard MBA notwithstanding, seems here to be lacking:

Many of the military's most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don'’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has so terrified the generals that they know they won'’t go public,” a former defense official said.

Senator John Murtha makes an appearance in this story:

One person with whom the Pentagon's top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer from what I call battle fatigue in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House'’s claims that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers haven't captured any in this latest activity —the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. So this idea that they'’re coming in from outside, we still think there'’s only seven per cent.”

Murtha'’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House'’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said.

The proposed bombing campaign appears to be conceived as an intentional in-your-face to the entire Muslim world. Perhaps it is a last-ditch attempt to ignite a holy war. The article makes clear that the fuckwits running this country won't be satisfied until there is no desolate, starving village anywhere on earth whose residents will not feel superior to the pathetic sickos who would elect such men to power.

CIA Veterans Oppose Torture

Some retired CIA officers have come out publicly in opposition to the Bush administration's preference for authorization of torture.

These experienced interrogators are confirming that torture is ineffective in extracting useful information from captured enemies. The damage to the international moral credibility of the United States from the recent abandonment of our principles seems to be the reason for the candor of these officers.

Some perennially high-profile retired CIA officers like Bob Baer, Frank Anderson, and Vincent Cannistraro recently spoke out to Knight Ridder about their opposition to torture on practical grounds (Cannistraro said that detainees will "say virtually anything to end their torment"). But over the past 18 months, several lesser-known former officers have been trying, publicly and privately, to convince both the agency and the public that torture and other unduly coercive questioning tactics are morally wrong as well.

One retired officer is more explicit as to the effect of a policy allowing torture on the torturer's own society:

Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it."

This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents "a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade" a nation in its own eyes and the world's.

"The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society," Gerber says, "is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that's acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society."

The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations.

"Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us," he says. "But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it's not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means."

This, in a nutshell, is how Cheney, Addington, and the other torture fetishists are actively harming U.S. intelligence capabilities. I have grave concerns about their true motivations. I suspect that many Americans share my apprehension of the actions of these kooks. The issue of torture is related to but entirely separate from the comprehensive damage done to our country by unnecessarily going to war in a part of the world that is vital to U.S. interests.

London Police Chief To Be Investigated

Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the London Metropolitan Police is to be investigated by an independent review panel for issuing repeated misleading statements after the shooting of an innocent man by police in the subway.

The incident, in which a 27 year old Brazilian electrician was gunned down at the Stockwell station, occurred while London was suffering a bad case of jitters following the 7-7 terror bombings.

Blair went before the cameras and made several declarations that later proved to be untrue. Some of these statements, such as what the innocent man was wearing and his behavior in the tube station could not have been simple misunderstandings since they were repeated by officials long after eyewitness evidence (including a photo of the body) had been circulated publicly.

The Brazilian man's family is refusing to go along with the whitewash. It is their protestations that have spurred the inquiry.

Lying to the public as standard operating procedure is said to have been utilized in Great Britain during the "Irish troubles," and to have been willingly embraced by the American media no later than the Vietnam war.

Recipe For A Civil War

The leader of the major Shiite political party in Iraq has requested that the U.S. stop playing Mr. Nice Guy and let his militia go after their Sunni enemies.

Abdul Aziz Hakim, who leads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), says in an interview with the Washington Post that the U.S. is being "too weak against Iraq's insurgency." He believes that his Badr Brigades would be able to defeat the "terrorists" with less interference from the United States. He stressed however, that he wants U.S. troops to remain in Iraq in the meantime to continue to create a viable Iraqi military.

Hakim is basically laying out a formula for civil war. He claims to be against only the Sunni terrorists, but after living under years of persecution, it is hardly a secret that the Shias want to even the score.

The issue points to a key difference between U.S. officials and some of Iraq's conservative Shiite leaders about what it will take to end the insurgency. Even the top U.S. generals say the ultimate solution is a political one, bringing minority Sunnis into a democracy that without them stands to be dominated permanently by the Shiite majority. But the leaders of many Shiite religious parties, reflecting their years in exile and their bitterness over the killing of relatives and supporters during Hussein's dictatorship, say the endgame is a military one.

Hakim charged that the United States, evidently fearful of alienating Sunnis, was blocking the arrests of Sunni political leaders who had ties to insurgents. "The mixing of security and political issues" was just another U.S. mistake, he said. "Terrorists should know there would be no dealing with them."

(...)

Yet suspicion of the Badr forces runs strong among Iraqis, especially since the discovery by the U.S. military this month of a secret prison in central Baghdad containing what Interior Minister Bayan Jabar, a Shiite, acknowledged were at least five to seven detainees who had been subjected to torture.

Hakim said charges of torture have long been drummed up by Hussein loyalists, and he asserted that the U.S. military is often present in Interior Ministry facilities. American troops, he said, had been in the building where the prison was discovered "four times a week."

Hakim also made clear he wanted leaders elected in December to move forward toward creation of a massive federal region in the Shiite south, an idea he first broached in August before thousands of supporters in a ceremony in the Shiite holy city of Najaf marking the second anniversary of his brother's assassination.

Some Americans and Iraqis have charged such a state would put much of Iraq, and its oil, under a Shiite-controlled theocracy heavily influenced by Iran. But Hakim noted that the Kurdish-populated north already has such a region, and he contended that Baghdad, with its mixed population, and the heavily Sunni west should form separate regions as well.

The draft constitution voted in this year "approved that Iraq should become regions," he said. "While we want to form a region in the south, we strive to maintain the unity of Iraq."

The United States hopes that Hakim is honest about his desire for a unified country. This is not likely. If he is only saying this because it is what his listener wishes to hear, we will soon be looking at three countries where there was once one. The timing of a U.S. withdrawal will then only matter to the families of the Americans who will die while our elected leaders continue to try to ignore the inevitable by acting tough on terrorism to save their political careers.

Major Increase In Surveillance of Innocent People

The evolution of the National Security State is proceeding apace with the enhancement of the powers of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).

CIFA is a Pentagon intelligence agency which will now be permitted to "investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage."

According to an article by Walter Pincus in today's Washington Post:

"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

This whole expansion of government spying is a by-product of the "chickenshit nation" syndrome arising from the trauma felt by many from 9-11. The powers that be have encouraged the psychological dependence of the fearful population to further their nefarious agenda.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI's massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage.

The measure, she said, "removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." She said the Pentagon's "intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate."

" Among domestic targets listed are people in the United States who it "is reasonably believed threaten the physical security of Defense Department employees, installations, operations or official visitors."

The security enthusiasts are making use of technical talismans to ward off "evil":

One CIFA activity, threat assessments, involves using "leading edge information technologies and data harvesting," according to a February 2004 Pentagon budget document. This involves "exploiting commercial data" with the help of outside contractors.

For CIFA, counterintelligence involves not just collecting data but also "conducting activities to protect DoD and the nation against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorist activities," its brochure states.

The Bush administration is taking sinister advantage of a nation still quietly shitting itself.

U.S. Troops Burn Two Taliban Corpses For "Hygienic" Reasons

A military inquiry into last month's episode near Kandahar in which two dead Taliban fighters were faced toward Mecca and burned by U.S. soldiers has determined that the procedure was carried out for "hygienic" reasons.

An American psy-ops unit was videotaped during the incident taunting with a loudspeaker any remaining Talibans who may have been still hiding in the area. Cremation is forbidden under Islam.

The investigation has resulted in disciplinary action being taken against four soldiers, according to Army Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya. Two officers who ordered the burning of the bodies have been reprimanded for "showing a lack of cultural and religious understanding." Two NCOs are being reprimanded for taunting the enemies with the loudspeaker.

"Our investigation found there was no intent to desecrate the remains, but only to dispose of them for hygienic reasons," Kamiya said.

The only permissible reason for burning combatants under the Geneva Convention is for reasons of "general hygiene."

This incident took place however in an area of desert, and the issue of contaminating ground-water doesn't fly. If burning enemy dead in Afghanistan was such a good idea for hygienic reasons, why then haven't we been burning them all?

Under the military's justification, the four Blackwater security contractors immolated in Fallujah in March 2004, may have only been burned for "hygienic reasons."

Report: U.S. Marines Battle Syrian Troops in Syria

There is a report out of the Middle-East that U.S. Marines were sent Thursday night, Nov. 24, from Iraq into Syria and have engaged in combat with Syrian border guards.

The report, from the Israeli website DEBKA says that the United States delivered an ultimatum to the government of Syria to hand over some senior commanders of Abu Musab al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq who had fled from the Mosul area under American military pressure. According to this account, Syria was unresponsive to the U.S. request, and the Marines soon followed into the neighboring country.

There is no mention whether the U.S. forces were successful in capturing or killing their prey.


Update: The story appears to have legs. I have seen a report that Syria has lodged an official protest with the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. The Syrians claim two border guards and two civilians have been killed in the incident.

The Reason Great Britain Invoked The Official Secrets Act

The controversy is continuing in England over President Bush's alleged threat to bomb the Qatar headquarters of the Al Jazeera network.

Great Britain invoked the Official Secrets Act to punish a former government employee who leaked a document detailing a conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. British newspapers are being threatened with prosecution if they publish the memo.

A report today from London says that the law was invoked to squelch the embarrassing report in order to avoid damaging the US/UK "special relationship.

Senior MPs, Whitehall officials and lawyers were agreed yesterday that Lord Goldsmith had "read the riot act" to the media because of political embarrassment caused by a sensitive leak of face-to-face exchanges between the prime minister and the US president in the White House in April 2004. He acted after the Daily Mirror said a memo recorded a threat by Mr Bush to take "military action" against the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera. Mr Blair replied that that would cause a big problem, reported the Mirror. David Keogh, a former Cabinet Office official, has been charged under the secrets act with sending the memo on the Blair-Bush conversation to Leo O 'Connor, researcher to the former Labour MP Tony Clarke.

The timing of the Bush/Blair meeting is interesting:

The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair took place at a time when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians are feared to have died. Pictures of the attack shown on al-Jazeera had infuriated US generals. The government was also arguing with Washington about the number of extra British troops to be sent to Iraq at a time when it was feared they would be endangered by what a separately leaked Foreign Office memo called "heavy-handed" US military tactics.There were UK anxieties that US bombing in civilian areas in Falluja would unite Sunnis and Shias against British forces. The criticism came not only from anti-war MPs, but from Mr Blair's most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers. When Mr Blair met Mr Bush in Washington, military advisers were urging the prime minister to send extra forces only on British terms.

Sources in London say that the British government had to stop the leak of the incriminating document immediately for fears that other politically damaging papers on the war had fallen into whistleblower hands and are being readied for release.

Lieberman Visits The Troops For Thanksgiving

Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) is paying a visit to Baghdad this Thanksgiving day to express his support for the American endeavor in Iraq. What are the odds that the troops would rather see any number of Hollywood bimbos than the whiney ex-running mate of Al Gore?

The hawkish Lieberman is quoted there as being encouraged by the political progress seen thus far. I rather doubt he is referring to the outcome a few days ago of the Cairo conference sponsored by the Arab League.

The Connecticut Senator has been most consistent in his war-mongering, having major culpability as one of the loudest (and earliest) cheerleaders for war from either party. Now with support for the war among the American public at an all-time low, Lieberman humps it over to Shitsville to pretend that all's well.

His act is getting really old. That turkey ought to give it a break.

Thatcher Threatened To Nuke Buenos Aires

A new book about the late French President Francois Mitterrand claims that during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher demanded the targeting codes for Argentina's French built missiles, and threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on the capital city of Buenos Aires unless France acquiesced.

The book is entitled "Rendez-vous: The Psychoanalysis of Francois Mitterrand", and is written by Ali Magoudi, the former President's psychiatrist. According to Magoudi, Thatcher extorted Mitterrand several days after Argentina sunk the British destroyer HMS Sheffield in the South Atlantic using the Exocet "fire and forget" anti-ship missile.

According to the book, which is to be published in France on Friday, Mitterrand provided the secret codes, having no other choice in the matter. Mitterrand is quoted as saying:

"One cannot win against the insular syndrome of an unbridled Englishwoman. Provoke a nuclear war for a few islands inhabited by three sheep as hairy as they are freezing! But it's a good job I gave way. Otherwise, I assure you, the Lady's metallic finger would have hit the button."

Magoudi claims that Mitterrand got even with "The Iron Lady" later by arranging for the "chunnel", the tunnel under the English Channel, to be built, forever depriving England of its island fortress status.

Little wonder that the neo-cons revere Mrs. Thatcher so.

Another Effing Outrage

There is a report from Great Britain that President Bush had to be dissuaded by Prime Minister Tony Blair from bombing the satellite television network Al-Jazeera.

A British government employee has been charged under their notorious Official Secrets Act with leaking a memo detailing a Bush/Blair conversation of April 16, 2004.

There have been a number of incidents in both Afghanistan and Iraq in which Al-Jazeera bureaus have been "accidently" bombed by U.S. aircraft. The headquarters of the Arab network happens to be in Qatar, a nation which is officially allied with the U.S. Being outside any plausible theater of war, one wonders about exactly the method Mr. Bush would have used to carry out the atrocity.

A British government official has been quoted as saying Mr. Bush's suggestion was made in jest. Others dispute this.

Even if this was a joke, what kind of psychopath would say something like that to the leader of another country?

All Factions Want Us Out

The clashing Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions in Iraq have managed to agree on at least one thing. They have called for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from their country.

At an Arab League sponsored conference in Cairo, all three groups signed a statement that "demands a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces."

The U.S. has for the duration of the war complained about the presence of "foreign fighters" who have been causing problems for our troops in their mission to bring democracy to Iraq. It is clear by their Cairo declaration who the Iraqi leaders view to be the most troublesome foreign element in the conflict.

The Iraqi leaders endorsed a general right of the people to resist foreign occupation, while at the same time condemning terrorism. This semantic feat was clearly an effort to get a final declaration that was acceptable to all parties. The fact that all parties could come to some kind of an understanding with each other seems to be an optimistic development. The communique sees the end of 2006 (not 2008 or 09 as viewed by Washington) as being a manageable final exit date.

The clearheadedness of the Iraqi factional leaders is contrasted by a bizarre letter to the editor printed in today's Washington Post.

The author is retired Gen. P.X. Kelley (USMC) who knows better than the Iraqis themselves what's best for their country. A former Commandant of the Corps, Kelley blasts the idea of setting a timetable for withdrawal. He goes so far as to blame the U.S. Congress' then-required War Powers Act hearings during Reagan's early 1980's incursion into Lebanon for motivating the attack on the USMC barracks that took the lives of 241 Marines.

This fucking kook cant strategically conceptualize the fact that Marines as well as soldiers are losing their lives daily in the shithole we have created in Iraq. How many more does he think we should sacrifice? When U.S. forces are gone from Iraq, they will no longer be sitting ducks like Kelley's Marines were in Lebanon in 1983.

Kelley cloaks his warning in a markedly not well-briefed confabulation of Osama Bin Laden and Iraq. That approach must still work somewhere, I presume.

Kelley's defense of projecting the American military to do the dirty work of the kleptocracy that rules this country is to be expected. The Marines have been, of course, the ambassadors of choice of the U.S. fruit companies, oil interests, and Wall Street since the early 1900's.

To borrow Kelley's closing words, "Lest We Forget!"

Google and the Future of the Internet

Robert X. Cringely's new article has some interesting thoughts on the role of Google in the evolution of the internet, now morphing into what's being called "Web 2.0."

Rumors about "the next big thing" from Google has been almost a cottage industry since Google itself was "the next big thing." The latest gossip claims that Google intends to become the world's biggest ISP. Cringely dismisses this, and in the process introduces the grist for another round in the Google rumor mill:

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Cringely envisions Google creating not a super ISP, but a faster, improved internet itself:

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

That's some kind of tall order, I say.

Cringely discusses the Google/Microsoft competition , making a prediction of an eventual victor:

Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.

(...)

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Cringely compares his idea of Google's plans to the business model of one of America's biggest (and most hated) companies:

Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Cringely's article is up to his usual high standards. He deals with other aspects of Web 2.0 that I refrain from detailing here due to limits of fair usage. Look at the article for yourself if you are interested. Of course, whether all this comes to pass will be influenced by other factors, such as the health of the economy.

Former Senator Bob Graham Weighs In

In the administration's scheme to cover-up their cherry picking of the pre-war intelligence, one tactic (of many) has been grating on the nerves of knowledgeable people.

This is the "everyone saw the same intelligence" lie. The Bush apologists claim that Senators, Congressmen, even foreign intelligence agencies all had access to the same reports and concluded that Saddam had WMDs. In "The Elephant In The Room", I mentioned how several of our allies had better intelligence about Iraq than the U.S. and provided no proof of any ongoing WMD programs.

Today former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), finishes demolishing the "everyone saw the same intelligence" fiction.

Graham details in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post how, as the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he saw reports that were not as clearly incriminating against Saddam as the administration was portraying publicly.

During Bush's stampede towards war, Graham makes known that the CIA had not even produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) until Graham instructed them to do so. This is shocking on the face of it. NIEs are the basic intelligence community product, their stock in trade. NIEs are classified reports produced on every conceivable subject that may be viewed as a threat to U.S. national security; such as epidemic diseases (West Nile Virus was one example), international drug cartels, weapons proliferation, political developments in various countries, etc.

DCI Tenet hastily threw together the Iraq weapons NIE in three weeks (they typically take several months). There were numerous dissents from community members about the existence of various weapons programs. Dissents are usually included in NIEs as footnotes indicating which agency was disputing which assertions, this is a common occurrence.

Graham was disquieted by the way the administration was ignoring the dissenting intelligence data, and requested a unclassified version of the NIE that could be released to the public. I will allow former Senator Graham explain what came next:

On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

I must finish with the following note. I have been told that the classified NIE was made available to be read by any Senator or Congressman who wished to see it. Only a few took the trouble, but the majority's willful ignorance did not stop them from deciding that the war sounded like a good idea. Dumbshits.

Poor Attempt At Spin

The Washington Post has come out today with an editorial that attempts to defend their star "investigative" reporter Bob Woodward.

The editorial page editors seem to think that a general advancement of the principle of protected reporter-source relationships is all that the Post's reader-sheep needs to see to soothe any hurt feelings over the outrage.

Notice, though, how they first distance themselves from the controversy:

Here we remind readers that the editorial page operates separately from those who gather and publish news in The Post. Mr. Woodward doesn't answer to us, and he has no input on our page.

From this comfortable perch, the editorial endeavors to spin this matter to the satisfaction of the average federal government employee who relies upon the Post for a coherent view of the world. They fail miserably. I need not go into my usual explication, a link is provided for those who are interested. Suffice it to say that the best they could come up with is:

Many of those who condemn Mr. Woodward applauded when The Post recently revealed the existence of CIA prisons around the world, a story that relied on unnamed sources.

And...

Is there a distinction to be made based on the motives of the leakers? If so, Mr. Woodward might have had to pass up his first big scoops three decades ago, because his Watergate source, Deep Throat -- recently revealed as FBI official W. Mark Felt -- was disgruntled at having been passed over for the post of FBI director.

A piss poor effort, if I may say so myself (and I would know).

Now to the nitty-gritty. This editorial ultimately fails because it avoids altogether the main complaint of media watchers everywhere about the actions in question of Bob "The Slitherer" Woodward.

Most people couldn't care less if Woodward runs his book enterprises like a whorehouse, that's his business. What is most egregious here is the fact that Woodward publicly attacked both the prosecutor and the investigation. When you do something like that, which all intrepid scribes do from time to time, you had best do so from a safe distance.

Given that Woodward is deeply implicated in the events of the "Plamegate" leak, the boldness of his attacks is the most puzzling aspect of his involvement. He acted if he believed himself to be protected somehow, even as he was protecting his source(s).

Woodward's silence for the last two and a half years can be viewed as the dog that didn't bark. When Fitzgerald determines why this hound kept quiet, he may very well find the evidence he needs to close this case.

CIA Diagnosis: Castro Has Parkinson's Disease

The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI) has issued a report saying that Cuban leader Fidel Castro is suffering from Parkinson's disease, according to several sources.

The Agency has conducted medical profiling of foreign leaders for years. The CIA once obtained a stool sample of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during a visit to Great Britain in order to look for traces of medicines or other evidence of medical problems.

Castro, for his part, responded to these reports by giving a five and a half hour speech in Havana last night, but did not expressly deny having Parkinson's. Castro was quoted as saying that "it would not matter" if he had the disease, adding "The Pope (John Paul II) had Parkinson's and went on for a lot of years traveling around the world."

The Miami Herald reported Wednesday that the CIA believes that Castro was diagnosed with the disease in 1998, and that the Agency began briefing policymakers on this matter a year ago.

Pentagon IG To Look At Feith's Actions

Douglas Feith, a former high-ranking Pentagon official alleged by both Tommy Franks and Lawrence Wilkerson to be the "dumbest man" either had ever met, is going to be the focus of a DOD Inspector General's investigation into pre-war intelligence.

As one of the main proponents of the Iraq war, Feith is believed to have manipulated (or cherry-picked) the available intelligence into the most sinister interpretations possible. When the responsible agencies failed to discover incriminating enough facts about Saddam's weapons, intentions, and possible links to 9-11, Feith went so far as to create his own in-house intelligence shop. His Office of Special Plans (veteran spook types blanched at his use of the words "special" and "plans") was where lukewarm assertions and cold leads were re-heated and cooked to perfection.

The IG's investigation was initiated at the separate requests of Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and of Sen. Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The review is expected to take at least six months.

Mr. Feith, in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, is said by insiders to have proposed a retaliatory attack upon the country of Colombia.

More level-headed policymakers decided upon Afghanistan, the home base of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda.

Poor Try From Moonie Paper

The Washington Times, the Unification Church-owned conservative mouthpiece, needs to do better research (or have a better memory) if it is to successfully shape public opinion in this town. Actually they need not bother, all the research and memory-improvement drugs in the world couldn't work a miracle of that size.

Today in an editorial, the Moonie paper actually has the cojones (what's Korean for balls?) to demand that Prosecutor Fitzgerald drop the charges against Lewis Libby.

Why, you ask?

The Washington Times actually thinks that Bob "The Slitherer" Woodward's revelation of having been told about Mrs. Wilson's true identity is somehow exculpatory for Mr. Libby.

Clearly there are no effing Einsteins writing editorials for the Times:

Bob Woodward's just-released statement, suggesting that on June 27, 2003, he may have been the reporter who told Scooter Libby about Joseph Wilson's wife, blew a gigantic hole in Patrick Fitzgerald's recently unveiled indictment of the vice president's former chief of staff.

Hello? Mr. Fitzgerald's indictment says that Libby learned of Plame's identity from Vice President Cheney "on or about June 12, 2003", and that was not the first Libby had heard about it.

Given the fact that the conversations in issue -- the one with Tim Russert and the one with Bob Woodward -- were separated by less than two weeks, and that officials like Mr. Libby juggle literally hundreds of matters on a daily basis, it is entirely plausible that he confused the two reporters.

Confused the two reporters? This is not even an issue. The "I learned it from a reporter" story was just that--a fiction (see indictment). Besides, nobody in Washington would confuse these two, not to mention that no policy-maker would confuse Woodward with anyone.

In light of these facts, it is at least doubtful whether a reasonable jury would find Mr. Libby guilty.

That what a trial will be useful for.

(U)nder the U.S. Attorney's Manual provisions, no prosecution should be commenced unless the attorney representing the government believes that he has evidence that will probably be sufficient to obtain a conviction. Accordingly, Mr. Fitzgerald should do the right thing and promptly dismiss the indictment of Scooter Libby.

Fitzgerald believes he has all the evidence necessary, because it is all there in black and white in the indictment.

I am perplexed by the very lameness of this editorial. With the administration so obviously swirling down the crapper, the stakes are very high for the conservative movement. Why then did the Washington Times publish such a pathetic composition?

Water-Carriers For Abusers of Power

Walter Pincus, a Washington Post reporter who testified in front of Prosecutor Fitzgerald's grand jury in the "Plamegate" case, has been held in contempt of court in a different but similar type of case.

The Post reporter, who is known for his access to good sources in the intelligence community, has refused to identify his source(s) in the Wen Ho Lee case. Mr. Lee, a nuclear physicist for the government at Los Alamos had been suspected of spying for China in the late 1990's. Anonymous government sources engaged in a campaign of leaks of incriminating information against Mr. Lee, who later pleaded guilty to one count of a much lesser charge.

Mr. Lee is suing the government over his treatment at the hands of federal authorities. Four other reporters have already been held in contempt in the Lee case: James Risen of the New York Times, H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press, Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times and ABC News' Pierre Thomas, then reporting for CNN.

What this case has in common with the CIA leak case is that, in both cases, reporters are standing up for upholding the confidentiality of sources who happen not to be public spirited whistle-blowers, but are instead government officials abusing their power.

Government officials leak sensitive and classified information daily in the policy wars in Washington. Published stories based on such leaks are essential to slowing this country's seemingly inevitable descent into a full-fledged national security state.

Examples like "Plamegate" and Wen Ho Lee seriously threaten valid claims of reporter-source confidentiality. Overlapping reporters and media outlets in these two cases lends credence to those who believe that the weakening of this privilege is a goal of the security fetishists.

The Reptilian Bob Woodward

The Washington Post, certainly no slouch when it comes to sucking up to power, stars today in a outrageous new assault upon the sensibilities of thinking people everywhere.

This time it is their legendary "investigative" reporter Bob Woodward who has been caught withholding important information from CIA leak case special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Woodward had seemed almost jealous during a number of recent televised appearances that he had not been in the loop in the "Plamegate" scandal. Woodward opined that Fitzgerald's investigation was much ado about nothing. He even went so far as claim that he was privy to a classified CIA after action report stating that no real damage had been done by the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's name and occupation.

It turns out that Woodward was up to his neck in the affair, speaking with three officials about Ms. Plame before her public unmasking by Robert Novak in early July 2003. The Post today details the secretive Woodward's duplicity (triplicity?) in not only withholding this fact from the prosecutor, but also from Post editors and readers.

Woodward slithers.

He deserves the fate of Judith Miller.

He slithers bad.

Big Oil and The Secret Energy Policy

We now know why Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AL) refused Democratic requests to swear in the oil company executives last week in front of the joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committees.

The oil execs took full advantage of Sen. Stevens atypically obliging nature to testify that their companies had not met in 2001 with Vice-President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force.

According to today's Washington Post, several of these execs were dissembling (or dis-assembling as George W. Bush would put it). The Post turned up a White House document which :

(S)hows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

Several of the execs are apparently familiar with Washington testimony-speak:

The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.

Smart guys. It is possible that the others are not completely off the legal hook:

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

This whole secret energy policy business smells of "big time" corruption. Even worse, I have spoken to a knowledgeable Washington hand who claims that plans for a U.S. intervention in Iraq were discussed in these meetings, which took place before 9-11.

The Elephant In The Room

The New York Times, now only half-jokingly known as "America's newspaper of record," today succeeds in ignoring the elephant in the room in an editorial entitled "Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials."

The Times rightfully castigates President Bush for his outrageous diversionary tactics on the questions of pre-war intelligence, but appears not to understand (or at least acknowledge) it's own role in propagandizing the nation in the months leading up to war.

The newspaper grasps at some straws:

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence.

What goes unsaid here is that at the time the U.S. had no decent intelligence contacts in Iraq, while several of our allies most certainly did. Turkey and Israel are two obvious examples.

There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons.

Really? The two countries I just named have never weighed in publicly, but cannot have had information supporting such an assertion since the claim turned out to be untrue.

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own.

They believed on the basis of what evidence? It is more likely that the administration knew there was no intelligence indicating Iraqi possession of WMD, but that during a thorough post-invasion search of the country, something would turn up. That's not a good enough basis to attack a sovereign nation.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

The New York Times is also rewriting history by omission of even the slightest allusion to Judy Miller's role in selling the war. After all, as anyone in the Washington policy world knows, Senators and U.S. Representatives often pay no attention to actual intelligence analyses and pay a great deal of attention to the New York Times.

A Compromise Too Far

The U.S. Congress, after withholding any input into the administration's prisoner abuse program, now sees fit to get involved.

The Senate has decided to deny habeas corpus--the right to seek access to the U.S. court system--to detainees held outside the United States. This is being presented by the media as a reasonable compromise between Republicans and Democrats:

By linking a provision to deny prisoners the right to challenge their detention in federal court with language restricting interrogation methods, senators hope to soften the administration's ardent opposition to McCain's anti-torture provision -- or possibly win its support.

It is a big mistake for the Congress to put their fingerprints anywhere near the administration's policies on detainees. This is because history is going to render a harsh critique on the men whose judgment was so flawed as to be intimidated by their fears (of terrorists or of being called weak on terrorism) into betraying the values that once inspired people worldwide. Lawmakers would be well-served to stay clear of this madness entirely, lest they be put into a worse position than the Democrats who voted to support the war itself.

The Congress' intervention at this late date means that the Supreme Court, which was on track to judge the legality of the Pentagon's military tribunal system for detainees this term, may be cut out of the process entirely.

In a unusually reasonable editorial today, The Washington Post misses the necessity for Congress to keep its nose clean on the issue of legitimizing any of the administration's policies on enemy detainees:

Preventing the justices from considering the commissions' legality will do nothing to address these problems; it will only sweep them under the rug. Congress needs to be making policy concerning Guantanamo, not shielding weak administration policy from judicial scrutiny.

The Court has historically been the force of reason when politicians have been too spineless to do the right thing. We are living in such a time.

Myanmar Abruptly Moves Government

The government of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) has suddenly packed up and moved 200 miles from Yangon (Rangoon) to a compound in the south-central city of Pyinmana. Myanmar is noteworthy for having a questionable human rights record, and being the world's second largest heroin producer.

It is not known why the leadership decided to make this drastic move, one rumor is that they fear an American invasion. The generals must not have gotten the memo that the U.S. Army is otherwise occupied. Not to mention that they are not on anyone's short list of logical American military targets.

The timing of the move seems linked to astrology. The move commenced at exactly 6:37 a.m. Sunday, November 5. The Burmese have been known to schedule important events, such as their independence celebration in 1948, to take advantage of auspicious positions of the stars.

Most Americans know astrology only as a frivolous diversion in the entertainment section of their newspaper. Other cultures, especially in Asia, take it much more seriously. The modern science of astronomy had its roots in astrology.

Too bad someone in the White House didn't consult the stars back in March 2003.

A Diagnosis For A Sick Foreign Policy

Jim Hoagland writes an op-ed in today's Washington Post that actually makes a cogent observation about the foreign policy catastrophe also known as the Bush administration.

Hoagland's finds a logical explanation for some of the irrational decisions that have come specifically from Bush and Cheney, i.e. the war, the defense of torture, etc.:

The core decision makers of the Bush team still see the world under the cloud of Sept. 11, while more and more citizens do not.

Heck, I had been under the impression that the constant flashing back to 9-11 was nothing more than an opportunistic exploitation of that event. Hoagland may have a point here. I will hasten to complete the thought. The policy excesses we have seen in the last few years, while horrifying to seasoned foreign relations types, can be viewed as rational coming from someone suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The dwindling number of citizens who approve of the bull in the china shop approach to international affairs can be viewed as similarly touched in the head.

Making policy from a psychologically disturbed world-view, however is not a way to further American interests anywhere in the world.

Hoagland stumbles later in the piece when he brings last week's bloodshed in Jordan into his argument:

The blasts in Jordan show that the murderous forces behind Sept. 11 are still on the march.

Hoagland is enough of an old Middle-East hand to know that this is a falsehood. Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq is less Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda than the band now touring as The Beach Boys is the original group known for those great songs of long ago California summers.

A wise man once wrote: "Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure." The U.S. would be wise to shake off any residual after-effects of 9-11 and get back to the principles that made this a great nation.

Egypt "Scuttles" U.S. Sponsored Meeting In Bahrain

The Bush administration's vision of a democratic Middle-East is not sitting well with one of the U.S.' main Muslim allies, Egypt. The conference's final declaration supporting democracy was blocked by Egypt over which types of political parties would be eligible for Western aid.

The U.S. organized a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Bahrain to work out arrangements to implement the previously announced "Broader Middle East and North Africa initiative." This basically is supposed to shovel money at opposition politicians and parties in the Muslim world in order to help foster "democracy."

Not surprisingly, except maybe to the U.S., Egypt's authoritarian government is balking at the idea. Egypt wants any assistance to go to strictly "legally registered" parties. That means that the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned religious party, would be ineligible. So too would any truly popular secular party that might arise. The Egyptian regimes of Mubarak and earlier, Sadat, became accustomed to our lavish support in exchange for their usefulness to U.S. foreign policy goals. It is not as if we are turning off the spigot of funding to Mubarak, he will still get by far the lion's share.

The U.S. policy of pushing a more pluralistic Middle-East is intended to extend to all the nations of the region. Whether or not we end up displacing any of our allies by this program remains to be seen. I rather doubt we will push things that far. We seek only to be seen by the "Arab street" as encouraging a democratic system.

The time-tested system of funding opposition parties through the CIA is evidently not accomplishing enough in this post 9-11 world. At least not in the authoritarian countries. Such a program suffers from its very utility. It is secret, and thus not able to get the mileage for our assistance we desire in the minds of the average Muslim.

A Question Of Policy, Not Intelligence

National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley is blaming war critics in Congress for believing the administration's lies about Iraq's WMDs.

Speaking in the White House briefing room, Hadley tried to counter the widespread view that the administration cherry-picked the intelligence it provided to lawmakers in order to convince them that Iraq was a clear and present danger.

The reason that this view is widespread is that it is true.

But the whole pre-war intelligence issue is all smoke and mirrors. The decision to go to war is a question of policy, not intelligence. This is important to keep in mind. We have intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of plenty of countries that to a greater or lesser extent threaten the interests of the United States. We do not automatically attack any or all of them as a pro forma matter based on a certain level of intelligence data.

The Bush administration guided this country into the Iraq war as an intentional policy decision, not as a national security necessity.

Stephen Hadley knows this and he is trying to muddy the water on this issue.

Or should I say, throw sand into the eyes of the umpire.


Update: Bush's re-iteration of Hadley's talking points today doesn't make them true. He is far too damaged politically to be pulling this kind of shit. Bush must feel that he has no choice but to do so.

The Omniscient Rev. Pat Robertson

The Reverend Pat Robertson had better hope that he never has to rely for his continued health and well being upon the prayers of the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania.

This is because the Rev. Robertson has divined that God will never again listen to the town's now spiritually imperiled residents. Not just that, but Robertson also hints at possible divine retribution towards the townsfolk.

Dover had the good sense to vote out of office all eight members of their school board after they attempted to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.

Rev. Robertson has a habit of making pronouncements about the will of God that could only be uttered by the Lord himself. The ironic aspect of this is that anyone trying to usurp the authority of God by making decisions that should rightly be left to the almighty would be a sinner of the grossest nature.

The intolerance and bigotry of the current generation of fundamentalists speaks loudly of a lack of true faith in the power of salvation.

I don't think the people of Dover have anything to worry about.

The Beatles Anomalies List

The internet is full of Beatles sites, but one of the best is What Goes On: The Beatles Anomalies List.

Mike Brown and Michael Weiss have collected information for years on various odd things that made it onto the recordings issued by the Beatles. These include instances of mixing errors, messed up lyrics and musical notes, unintentional noises and voices, etc. Once you have heard these songs hundreds (or thousands) of times, you just figure that many of these were supposed to be part of the song. This website shows you otherwise and deciphers just what you are hearing.

From the introductory page:

Have you ever ...

... heard chattering, voices, or odd noises in the background of a Beatles song?

...wondered who sang "She Loves You" at the end of All You Need Is Love ?

... heard stories about what John sings at the end of Baby You'’re A Rich Man?

...wanted to know which Beatles song, played on the radio the world over, has an undeleted expletive in, where it is, and why it happened?

... wondered where the famous edit is in Strawberry Fields Forever, and what the Morse code in it might mean?

...puzzled over strange voices in I Am The Walrus, Yellow Submarine, and Revolution No. 9?

...or wondered about these backwards messages about Paul ?

...wanted to know about that alarm clock noise, where John can be heard chewing gum, what'’s tapping through Blackbird, why there are bits missing in Day Tripper'’s guitars, what all those strange bits in Helter Skelter are all about, and who'’s got the blisters?

...Then keep reading, for you are among friends.

The site is searchable by alphabetical order or by album. These lads (Mike and Michael) have a hard-copy book out too. Take a look at the site, it will be well worth your time.

Funny Stories About Judy

A long piece in today's Style section of the WP features the now retired Judith Miller. Judy is remembered here by many as a difficult person.

Her long suffering ex-colleagues detail some incidents which must have been infuriating to them at the time, but are revealing about her true nature:

Colleagues in the region recall her as hypercompetitive, sometimes disturbingly so.

Youssef M. Ibrahim, who was Middle East regional correspondent for the Times for 10 years beginning in 1986, says Miller tried to steal an interview he'd scheduled in the mid-1980s with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian foreign ministry official who would later become United Nations secretary general.

As Ibrahim recalls it, Miller told him she was "intercepting" the Boutros-Ghali interview, that she had seniority, says Ibrahim, who left the Times in 1999.

They shouted at each other, he says. He is not even sure who hung up on whom. In the end, Ibrahim got his interview -- without Miller present.

(...)

Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.

Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.

To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.

"She had gotten too close to her sources," he says.

This final bit is a real gut-buster:

As a Times reporter, Miller's reputation both preceded and lingered after her -- as a colleague discovered one day in 2001 when he was reporting at the Afghan foreign ministry in Kabul.

Officials there didn't speak great English, and there was much back and forth, until the reporter uttered the words "New York Times," which the officials understood. They started shouting at the reporter, "Do you know Judy Miller? Do you know Judy Miller?"

Turns out, these officials had been on the receiving end of Miller's aggressive reporting when she traveled in Afghanistan in search of al Qaeda training camps.

"This Judy Miller! She was so pushy and she was demanding and pressing us to take her to those al Qaeda camps but we couldn't go and she told us we were covering up" and on and on, the Afghanis yelled at Miller's amused colleague that day. And he was duly impressed. (He requested anonymity to avoid being drawn into the controversy.)

Ho ho ho.

The Reason Why Tuesdays Are Election Days

David Broder discusses today (Washington Post) a group formed by Andrew Young, Carter's former ambassador to the U.N., called "Why Tuesday?." Young's group is lobbying to change election days in the United States to the weekend so that more working Americans can get to the polls.

I doubt this effort will come to success, 200 years of inertia is not easily overcome.

The reason I am discussing this at all is that Broder includes a brief history of how Tuesday got selected in the first place:

And why Tuesday? The debates from the time tell us that Tuesday was deemed the most convenient day for what was then a largely rural society. Saturday was a workday on the farm. Sunday was the Lord's day, not to be profaned with partisanship. But it took a day for many farmers to reach the county seat in those horse-and-buggy times, so Monday was out as well. Tuesday or Wednesday would let them vote and return home in time for the weekend. But Wednesday was market day for many communities, so Tuesday it became by process of elimination.

You learn something new every day.

The Online Books Page

There has been much controversy lately over Google's plan to digitize and put online the contents of some of the greatest libraries in the world. The big publishing houses are protesting what they see as infringement of copyright law.

American copyright law is extremely restrictive in terms of length of protection compared to Europe. In America, for works created on or after January 1, 1978, the copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. This is excessive. In Europe, copyrights last only 50 years period. No "life of the author plus" business.

In any case, there already are vast numbers of books in the public domain available online. One of the best sites is The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania. These folks have linked to and organized books on nearly every conceivable topic. Vast numbers of books are being added there daily.

CDC May Distribute 1918 Killer Flu

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is considering sending the recently re-engineered 1918 flu virus to qualified labs in the United States:

"There are 300 non-government research labs registered to work with deadly germs like the Spanish flu, which killed millions of people worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consider requests for samples from those labs "on a case-by-case basis," CDC spokesman Von Roebuck said Wednesday.

Dangerous biological agents are routinely shipped through commercial carriers like FedEx or DHL, following government packaging, safety and security guidelines.

Last month, U.S. scientists announced they had created "— from scratch"— the 1918 virus. It was the first time an infectious agent behind a historic global epidemic had ever been reconstructed.

Researchers said they believed it would help them develop defenses against the threat of a future pandemic evolving from bird flu, which was found to have similar characteristics as the 1918 virus.

About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles. CDC officials said at the time the particles would be stored at a CDC facility in Atlanta, and that there were no plans to send samples off campus.

But that statement did not mean there was a policy against sending samples elsewhere, Roebuck said."

Just in case the precautions being taken break down somehow, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has established a pretty decent looking website to provide "official" information on pandemic influenza and the newest bogeyman--avian influenza.

PandemicFlu.gov features such categories as:

• Health and Safety
• Monitoring Outbreaks
• Planning and Response Activities
• Travel and Transportation
• Research Activities

With any luck, we won't need this info. But you never know.

Bureaucratic Battle Over Torture

It looks like the adults are trying to take control in the battle over whether Americans can legally torture detainees.

The voices of morality, sanity and just plain operational effectiveness have joined Sen. John McCain's lonely battle against the torture fetishists led by Dick Cheney and Porter Goss. McCain's amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act, which attempts to make the U.S. comply with its obligations as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, has been fought tooth and nail by the administration. See also my earlier Cheney, The Loose Cannon and A Kook By Any Other Name for specifics of the dispute.

The advocates of torture are now seeking to exempt the CIA from McCain's Amendment.

The tell-tale sign that reason is rearing its head comes in the form of two pieces in the dominant establishment mouthpieces.

The New York Times has an article by Douglas Jehl on a report by the CIA's Inspector General from early 2004 which warned that some of the authorized techniques used in interrogations of detainees veered into prohibited territory vis a vis the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the 1949 Geneva Conventions:

"The previously undisclosed findings from the report, which was completed in the spring of 2004, reflected deep unease within the C.I.A. about the interrogation procedures, the officials said. A list of 10 techniques authorized early in 2002 for use against terror suspects included one known as waterboarding, and went well beyond those authorized by the military for use on prisoners of war.

The convention, which was drafted by the United Nations, bans torture, which is defined as the infliction of "severe" physical or mental pain or suffering, and prohibits lesser abuses that fall short of torture if they are "cruel, inhuman or degrading." The United States is a signatory, but with some reservations set when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994.

The report, by John L. Helgerson, the C.I.A.'s inspector general, did not conclude that the techniques constituted torture, which is also prohibited under American law, the officials said. But Mr. Helgerson did find, the officials said, that the techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the convention.

The agency said in a written statement in March that "all approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture." It reaffirmed that statement on Tuesday, but would not comment on any classified report issued by Mr. Helgerson. The statement in March did not specifically address techniques that could be labeled cruel, inhuman or degrading, and which are not explicitly prohibited in American law. "

That last bit about all this crap being legal is CIA legalese asserting that they were not breaking the law, although the IG seems to think otherwise:

"In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability, the officials said. They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to C.I.A. interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.

..."The ambiguity in the law must cause nightmares for intelligence officers who are engaged in aggressive interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects and other terrorism suspects," said John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the agency who left in 2004. Mr. Radsan, now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, would not comment on Mr. Helgerson's report.

...The agency issued its earlier statement on the legality of approved interrogation techniques after Mr. Goss, in testimony before Congress on March 17, said that all interrogation techniques used "at this time" were legal but declined, when asked, to make the same broad assertion about practices used over the past few years.

On March 18, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, the agency's director of public affairs, said that "C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice."

Her reference to the DOJ hints at the scope of this bureaucratic battle.

The second revealing piece is an op-ed in the Washington Post by ex-CIA General Counsel Jeffrey H. Smith, who as a State Department officer was instrumental in the negotiations that freed Natan Sharansky from Soviet imprisonment. Smith details inter alia the reasons that a policy allowing the torture of detainees is counterproductive. One is the quid pro quo expected to be extended to Americans who may happen to be captured in the future. Another is the simple question of morality. Smith concludes with my exact point from last week:

"There may be an argument for exempting the CIA from the McCain amendment. If so, the president and vice president should publicly make the case. They should say why they believe treatment of prisoners outside the Geneva Conventions would provide vital intelligence to protect us. They should give examples of how such treatment has produced valuable intelligence. If the choice is between the McCain amendment as modified by Cheney and nothing, we are better off with doing nothing and leaving the law where it is. Sooner or later this nation will come to its senses and remember how important international law and the Geneva Conventions are to our standing in the world and the protection of our citizens."

The outlines of important battles in Washington can often be glimpsed in articles full of leaked classified info and on the op-ed pages.

Virginia: A Test Case For Electronic Voting

Today is election day in Virginia.

The state holds the distinction of having a Governor's race the year immediately following the Presidential elections. Predictably this results in the race being viewed as a referendum on the party occupying the White House. The unbroken precedent since the days of Jimmy Carter has been for the Governor to be chosen from the opposite party from the householder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that Virginia allows a Governor only one term in office eliminates any bias from a popular incumbent running again. I suppose in theory that the coat-tails of a really beloved Governor could be exploited, but I have never heard of a beloved Governor here of either party.

The election today provides a real-life test of the belief of many that the Republicans have engineered the electronic voting machines to favor the less popular candidate.

There is no way in God's green earth that the travails of President Bush and other prominent Republicans wont deal a coup de grace to Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore.

If Kilgore, who was trailing by a statistically insignificant margin in pre-election polls, manages to pull this one off, I would consider it to be additional circumstantial evidence against the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines as currently designed.

Ahmad A. Ahmad's Not So Excellent Adventure

A Chicago Tribune editorial assistant of Jordanian descent recently had an encounter with the brave (sic) new world of post 9-11 America.

Ahmad A. Ahmad has lived in the United States for 12 years, and speaks English with an accent. He was taking a train from Chicago to New York to visit his sister when the trip was interrupted by a derailment on the tracks ahead. The passengers waited outside Albany for a bus to take them the rest of the way. In the bus terminal, Ahmad drew the attention of a middle aged white man who began to pepper him with questions.

I will allow Mr. Ahmad to tell you the rest:


I decided to call my mother in Chicago to tell her what happened. We spoke in our native tongue, Arabic.

The man whispered something into his girlfriend's ear.

Once on the bus, the man stepped inside the bathroom. He was there for quite a while. Before long, his girlfriend joined him inside.

This was all a bit odd.

I heard sirens approaching, and the bus suddenly came to a stop on the side of the highway. Police cars came--so many I couldn't even begin to count them. The man and his girlfriend ran down the aisle, past me, and off the bus.

We all stepped out to see what happened.

There was the stranger, pointing to me, "He is going to blow up the Amtrak!"

The man told police he understood Arabic and had overheard my conversation. He thought I was talking to some terrorist cell when I was chatting with my mother.

The police put me in the back of their vehicle. Dogs were sniffing around, and officers from the state Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Unit were interviewing my fellow bus passengers.

My cell phone was low on battery and had turned off, but they would not turn it back on. For all they knew, it could have been a bomb. I was shocked, confused, speechless.

The authorities questioned me for nearly three hours at an Albany police station. They asked me where I was from, whether I was a United States citizen, who I knew in New York City, who I worked for, and why I was traveling alone.

I answered every question in a calm and collected demeanor.

The officers were, for the most part, courteous and understanding of my situation.

One officer, Investigator James L. Rogers of the New York State Police, would later call me twice to make sure I made it to New York City with no hassles. Once the police realized the man couldn't actually speak Arabic, they knew the allegations were baseless, and that he was a wacko, hell-bent on deporting every Muslim back to the Middle East.

Just when I was leaving, I saw that man again.

He cursed at me and called me a terrorist. "Come and fight me!" he yelled. "You're lying out of your teeth! You know you want to blow up the Amtrak!"

I know people say Americans are living in a new America, after what happened on that Tuesday morning four years ago.

For the majority of Muslims, who are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, we, too, are living in a new America.

This is our reality.

(End excerpt)


Does anyone have a doubt who the accuser voted for in 2004?

Cheney, The Loose Cannon

Vice-President Dick Cheney's preoccupation with ensuring that the U.S. Congress makes no law restricting the terror fighters' right to abuse detainees is now distracting other policymakers from carrying out their duties.

Today's Washington Post reveals that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was recently forced to interrupt a busy official visit to Canada in order to convene a secure teleconference with Cheney to ensure that he didn't unilaterally decide U.S. policy on the treatment of detainees.

As I discussed last week in my groundbreaking A Kook By Any Other Name, Cheney and his longtime counsel David Addington have been working for the last three and a half years to allow the U.S. to ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of enemy prisoners of war.

This kind of crap has got to stop. The reputation of the United States in the community of nations has been earned at far too much cost of American blood to allow these chickenhawks to project their fearful world-view into policy any more. The Iraq war is bad enough, but trying to weasel out of the Geneva Conventions is beneath contempt.

National Security Letters

What could be more natural for a national security state than to have national security letters. These must be the cool new fashion accessories worn on the letterman jackets of the varsity players in the war on terror. It would stand to reason that you get a big "C" for CIA, "D" for DIA (or would that be DEA?), "N" for NSA, "F" for FBI, the list must just go on and on. I bet you would get the best chicks when wearing a national security letterman jacket.



Update:

It has been pointed out to me that I was wrong about national security letters. They are apparently secret letters sent by the FBI to people and institutions demanding access to private information regarding someone who is under the ouija eye of the terror fighters. The Patriot Act created these monstrosities. The FBI issues 30,000 of these annually, according to today's Washington Post. The recipient of one of these letters cannot tell anyone, presumably even his or her lawyer, about his/her new pen pal.

Only a country that is scared shitless could devise such an advertisement of its own weakness.

Why No Denials About Bush From The White House?

I have been thinking that there is something very suspicious about how the White House is handling the "Plamegate" scandal.

You would think that if President Bush had no contemporaneous personal knowledge of Karl Rove's Joe and Val Wilson bashing, The White House would have come right out and said so explicitly. Everyone knows about Bush's loyalty towards his people, but this would be carrying it to the level of absurdity. If Bush wasn't involved, one way or another, there is no way in hell he would allow this matter to decimate his poll numbers and credibility without sticking up for himself.

I know some people would claim Bush is not smart enough to figure this out. But unless it is just George W. and Karl alone against the world, someone would have insisted he distance himself from "Plamegate" by asserting his innocence.

Just when I was thinking that I had been missing something, the New York Times today publishes an article touching in an off-hand way on this very issue:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - In the hours before the Justice Department informed the White House in late September 2003 that it would investigate the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, gave reporters what turned out to be a rare glimpse into President Bush's knowledge of the case.

Mr. Bush, he said, "knows" that Karl Rove, his senior adviser, had not been the source of the leak. Pressed on how Mr. Bush was certain, Mr. McClellan said he was "not going to get into conversations that the president has with advisers," but made no effort to erase the impression that Mr. Rove had assured Mr. Bush that he had not been involved.

Since then, administration officials and Mr. Bush himself have carefully avoided disclosing anything about any involvement the president may have had in the events surrounding the disclosure of the officer's identity or anything about what his aides may have told them about their roles. Citing the continuing investigation and now the pending trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, they have declined to comment on almost any aspect of the case.

The issue now for the White House is how long it can go on deflecting the inquiries and trying to keep the focus away from Mr. Bush.

The establishment New York Times then takes great pains to steer the article away from the explosive intimation hinted to above:

While there has been no suggestion that Mr. Bush did anything wrong, the portrait of the White House that was painted by the special counsel in the indictment of Mr. Libby was one in which a variety of senior officials, including Mr. Cheney, played some role in events that preceded the disclosure of the officer's identity.

Mr. Bush was not mentioned in the indictment. But the fact that so many of his aides seem to have been involved in dealing with the issue that eventually led to the leak - how to rebut or discredit Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had challenged the administration's handling of prewar intelligence - leaves open the question of what the president knew.

The White House has also kept a tight lid on information about what Mr. Bush learned afterward about any involvement that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove and others may have had in the leak.

The Times later finds it necessary to wheel out a Republican tool:

"A White House that is aggressively on message is an unstoppable political tool," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant. "Just as the Clinton White House got itself back together in '95 and after impeachment, this White House will get itself together, too."

Whatever political problems the Libby indictment creates, he said, "It's a long way from the Veep's office to the Oval. No one has ever hinted that President Bush was involved in this or was even aware of it. I really don't think the issue will have legs beyond the next couple of weeks."

It seems that the Times wants to spin the story further away from Bush:

The administration's supporters point out that Mr. Bush has repeatedly emphasized that the White House will cooperate fully with the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The administration raised no issues of executive privilege when it came to documents sought by investigators. Mr. Fitzgerald had given no indication that he was denied any information on the ground of national security. No officials are known to have taken the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating themselves.

Therefore, allies of the White House said, it would be hard to make a case, legally or politically, that there was any organized effort to cover up what happened, despite Mr. Libby's indictment on charges of trying to do just that. And assuming that Mr. Fitzgerald does not indict Mr. Rove in the next few weeks, Mr. Bush has a natural firebreak available to him.

If I was Bush and was innocent of any illegal involvement, I think that I would mention it.