Power Surge of the PoMo

Lambert picks up on something odd:


NSA risking electrical overload
Officials say outage could leave Md.-based spy agency paralyzed
By Siobhan Gorman
Sun reporter
Originally published August 6, 2006
WASHINGTON // The National Security Agency is running out of juice.

The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials...

The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, using as much electricity as the city of Annapolis, according to James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author of two comprehensive books on the agency.

Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA has ramped up its operations, and the electricity needed to sustain major projects — such as the warrantless surveillance program and technology modernization programs — has increased sharply.

The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Let's get this straight. A 350-acre complex sucks up as much juice as an entire mid-sized city. And it needs more. I guess John Titor would say that's just what's needed to build a decent space-time twister.

There's some highly weird things going on in Washington these days. Some of the recent events have been the "disclosure" that the Pentagon lied to Congress as the NORAD tapes attest. But it's a funny kind of disclosure designed to "answer" more questions than it raises. Jeff Wells points to some questions that people somewhat removed from the buzz- New Zealand's far enough to avoid most of the fallout- have asked:

Here are* Eleven Questions* that the corporate media have thus far refused to raise or attempt to answer in their examination of the NORAD tapes and related issues:

1. *Who was responsible for scheduling multiple war games and terror exercises involving aircraft for Sept. 11th

2. Who moved "Global Guardian" normally scheduled for October to September?

3. Who designed the war games to involve 'hijackings'?

4. Who planned and scheduled the movement of Airforce aircraft north to Canada, Alaska and Greenland?

5. Who planned the terror exercise at the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) involving an evacuation in response to threat from the air?

6. Who was "hands-on" responsible for coordinating all the war games the morning of September 11th?

7. Who would have been responsible for turning off the war games to enable a timely real world response to the attacks?

8. How were as many as 21 false radar blips or possible targets (per Jane Garvey) inserted into FAA radar screens?

9. Who was responsible for the identification of ghost flight 11 which allegedly continued to fly south past Manhattan and which may have caused NORAD's Langley intercept jets to vector North toward NYC rather than D.C.? * [NOTE: John Farmer of the 9/11 Commission said to me personally that the 9/11 Commission was never able to identify the individual for this information--to resolve this anomaly.]*

10. Why was there no reference to the pattern of 9/11 Commission cover-up including that of Able Danger as revealed by Capt. Scott Philpott?

=================

* 11. The bottom line question that corporate media refuse to answer and which the 9/11 Commission ignored is who, specifically, would have been responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the confusion or fog the morning of 9/11 and who should have immediately ceased any and all war gaming activity and deceptive radar data?

Last week we were also treated to the spectacle of HHHillary raking Darth Rumsfeld over the coals, or the Sith Lord dissin' a critic unworthy of Gitmo, depending on your point of view. The spectacle of most of the progressive blogsphere swooning over HHHillary's hardnose interview was amazing. That PoMo MoFo at The New York Pravda seemed to me the only one who really saw what happened:

The enunciation of a clear sentence about the war in Iraq by Hillary Clinton means that there must be an election coming up.

Until now, she has been unsubtly subtle about the most urgent issue facing the country, sending signals rightward, sending signals leftward, tacking here, tacking there. Some days she seemed to be signaling whether she intended to signal.

But now, suddenly, she's a woman of passion, a model of concerned clarity. After an eon of calculated silence on most of the big moral questions of the day, there is a calculated breaking of the silence. The enigma won't play anymore. It's time for the drama.

But the drama played like "The Taming of the Shrew," with the only question being, who was the shrew?

Hillary was trying to bring Rummy to heel, and Rummy was trying to exert manly control over Hillary...

"I just don't understand why we can't get new leadership that would give us a fighting chance to turn the situation around," Senator Clinton said after the hearing, summing up a truth acknowledged by everyone except W. and Dick Cheney, and particularly felt at the Pentagon, where the deeply unpopular defense chief has gone from self-styled matinee idol to self-destructing idle martinet.

During the hearing, Hillary unmanned Rummy, as Shakespeare would say, accusing him of incompetence, impotence and improbity...

She tartly summed up: "Because of the administration's strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?"

There was a pause while Rummy summoned all the condescension he usually reserves for doltish reporters.

"My goodness," he exhaled finally, firing off a defense that could have been translated as: "Where do I start educating you on your utterly superficial understanding of the enemy, you harridan hippy-dippy Henny Penny?"

The Pentagon rank and file have tuned out Rummy, whose only transformation so far has been to transform himself into a dangerous, deluded codger. But when the respected General Abizaid admitted that "it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war," it was clear Iraq was already in one. It opened up a river of talk across the river about what people there had long been afraid to say: that Rummy's jutting jaw is not going to cut it. There needs to be an alternative strategy to keep our kids from having to fight their way out of a sectarian conflagration.

When Hillary and Rummy square off, it is a gladiatorial contest of two masters at hauteur, self-righteousness, scriptedness, infighting and belief in their own manifest destiny.

Hillary wants to avoid Joe Lieberman's fate by arguing that how the administration went about this war has caused all the problems, not that it went to a needless war she supported. Her stratagem avoids the lie that set off all the other lies, and leaves Hillary risking a John Kerry problem, being both for the war and against it.

It's going to be a tough triangulation. Even Bill never had to squirm his way out of something as hard as this.

Hillary seems to have read her Hunter S. Thompson and seems to be turning against The War sooner than HHH did.

Still, she's owned by Carlyle Group affiliates. You can count on Hillary to at least attempt national health care. You can not count on her to really end the Endless War.

But that isn't weird at all.