The Company's company gets a Poindexter upgrade

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, has hired Christopher Darby, a veteran executive with experience building companies and a background in Web security, as its new chief executive.

...Darby comes to the CIA position after several changes over the past year. Gilman Louie, who was very present here in Silicon Valley, left to launch his own venture capital firm here (we'll let you know when the firm opens its doors), and then Amit Yoran was in the In-Q-Tel spot for less than four months, replaced in April by interim CEO Scott Yancey....

This is not a Silicon Valley guy... He joins In-Q-Tel from Intel, but was only at Intel for a year, after Intel had acquired his Illinois company, Sarvega. He was CEO of Sarvega, which supplied "XML networking and security products." Before that, Darby was chairman and chief executive of Cambridge, Mass.' @stake, an Internet security consulting company acquired by Symantec. Before that, he was president and CEO of Interpath Communications...



In-Q-Tel used to be all Star Wars all the time, but the ex-CSC/ DynCorp CIA/ CEO rocket scientist who headed it in those days moved to head NASA at Darth Rumsfeld's bequest.

Now with the old Clinton-era elements largely purged, the Company seems to have decided to set up its own TIA in its private proxy.

Its primary job, of course, will likely be to spy on the NSA. Its secondary priority will be the DNC. When they aren't busy trying looking at your hardrive, anyway.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A New Kind of Fascism from the Same Old Cabal

Just to let some of my newer readers and commenters that haven't made the cut know: I am partisan- for the Constitution of the United States. This is a progressive liberal technocratic secular humanist blog. It's principal and unapologetic goal to educate people about what is going on in this world.

When Bill & HHHillary Clinton support the Iron Triangle, give them Hell. See here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

In short, when the Clintons come down on the side of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton manipulation of the system, they don't get support here.

On the other hand, when they do the right thing, which they've done with far greater frequency than the current administration, I'm on their side. [Caveat: a lot of their good deeds may have been largely due to the influence of Al Gore.] They did quite a better job of protecting the country from terrorism than the Cheneyburton administration has.

If you find that evaluation partisan, maybe you shouldn't be here.

Another man who shouldn't be here- in fact, he belongs in prison for the crimes against the United State and humanity he's committed- is Donald Rumsfeld.

Yesterday, he suggested the majority of people in this country that opposed the NeoCon policy of Endless War, and in particular, the Iraqi War, were traitors, comparing us to Hitler appeasers.

Exactly who invaded whom in this war? Who struck first? Who profits from it? Mr. Rumsfeld's profiting, among others, including the Saudis who supported the action of Al Qaeda. If you want links for these statements, I suggest you read my blog. Or Google Bandar Bush, or Rumsfeld and Carlyle, or Bechtel, or General Dynamics, or ABB.

Today Keith Olbermann gave it to Mr. Rumsfeld with both barrels.

Please watch it all, then read the transcript carefully. It's a historic document, whatever comes afterwards. The Democrats are beginning to awaken. Mr. Rumsfeld, and his cabal of men and women that have usurped the rule of Law, can not afford to let their power go in an open elections.

Either this Republic's about to go the way it did in Imperial Rome or face a constitutional crisis to dwarf Watergate.

Bu$hie's turning up the heat for the War with Iran and calling his opposition seditious.

There's no profit in doing anything else for him.

He might decide to try to fill all those Halliburton camps yet.  ¶ 10:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Half a Billion for the Cru$ade

Via Lambert:

Yes, it seems that Bush has indeed wangled himself and Unka Karl $450 million smackeroos in a slush fund they can get their paws on right now and do anything they want with. Surprise! The story has a lot of detail, but the bottom line is simple: The terms of the Softwood Lumber Agreement with Canada will give Bush complete control of an escrow account with $450 million in it, controlled by a board that Bush appoints, and which can be used for any purpose whatever, with no Congressional oversight...

Link-rich and very detailed.

Good thing they moved the Office of Special Plans out of the Pentagon and into Rove's closet- and across the border, too.  ¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  On Questioning Authority

The disinformation hangs thick around him, and he certainly wanders way off the trail, but sometimes he hits the mark. For your consideration, Jeff Wells with some links I've added:

...An appeal to authority is a strong attractor, even to many who profess to question it. The "9/11 Movement" has largely been lost to this crippling way of thought that perpetuates the myth of our own inadequacies. What we need, it's been said for years now, is someone on the inside to blow this wide open. And the Inside has happily obliged, providing a stream of dubious "whistleblowers" to muddy clear waters with sensational scoops and who soon vanish, leaving only confusion behind. The Inside has even gifted 9/11 with leadership: pied pipers who have shifted the focus towards the sexiest and least substantial arguments, and who are embraced and elevated according to the depths of their insider bona fides. Former Bush advisors, Republican bagmen and CIA operatives all speak with the seducing voice of authority, and when they say Nevermind that; look over here, too many of us look. (The rise to prominence of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" is another example of our too-easily exploited deference to authority, even when the authority addresses issues unrelated to its field of expertise.)

And what do we mean by Inside? Many who push 9/11 as an "inside job" seem to want to push Osama right out of the picture, but bin Laden is himself inside the security-narcotics-terror nexus, composed of factions that interpenetrate one another, which sometimes compete and sometimes strike strategic alliances depending upon what advantages they believe they can gain and how best they can outplay the other. Look at al Qaeda, NATO's silent partner in Bosnia. Look at the ISI, al Qaeda's patron and the CIA's proxy. Look at the drug trafficking common to all, and double agents such as Omar Saeed Sheik. But the fact they're all inside to a certain degree doesn't mean they act as one, without self interest or competing agendas. Inside, there can be a convergence of interests, even at cross purposes.

The pull of authority holds for other subjects that have been pushed even farther to the margins, for which established authority does not even exist... So without authority to explain it, most choose not to see it.

But we don't need to get inside, and we shouldn't want to. Inside is a compartmentalized labyrinth that even insiders with the best of intentions would be unable to negotiate. Outside, and from a distance, is perspective. What we need is better Outside intel.

It's like Shystee says, any complex of human interaction develops characteristics of chaotic systems.

An observer can't help but interact with something being observed, but there are multiple levels of interaction, and some are far more interested in outcomes than others.

Certainly the Islamofascists are a real and present danger. But then, so are the TheoCons. And the narcotic/ human trafficking underworld. And the complacency of those who believe in a bipolar world.

The NeoCons might look like puppets of the Cheneyburton cabal. But you can't be sure who's manipulating whom. The lines of control and influence are nothing like linear.  ¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Friend of the Family

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is a longtime and prominent member of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list, which notes his role as the suspected mastermind of the deadly U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa on Aug. 7, 1998.

But another more infamous date -- Sept. 11, 2001 -- is nowhere to be found on the same FBI notice.

The curious omission underscores the Justice Department's decision, so far, to not seek formal criminal charges against bin Laden for approving al-Qaeda's most notorious and successful terrorist attack...

Bin Laden was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 after being indicted for murder, conspiracy and other charges in connection with the embassy bombings, and a $5 million reward was put on his head at that time. The listing was updated after Sept. 11, 2001, to include a higher reward of $25 million, but no mention of the attacks was added...

So exactly who should we blame for 9/11 if not Osama? Why, that source of all evil, the Mighty Clenis™.

Of course, this Rovian media blitz will have nothing to do with the facts:

Starting in 1995, Clinton took actions against terrorism that were unprecedented in American history. He poured billions and billions of dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community. He poured billions more into the protection of critical infrastructure. He ordered massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack. He order a reorganization of the intelligence community itself, ramming through reforms and new procedures to address the demonstrable threat. Within the National Security Council, "threat meetings" were held three times a week to assess looming conspiracies. His National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prepared a voluminous dossier on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, actively tracking them across the planet. Clinton raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave in the last three years of his tenure. In 1996, Clinton delivered a major address to the United Nations on the matter of international terrorism, calling it "The enemy of our generation."

Behind the scenes, he leaned vigorously on the leaders of nations within the terrorist sphere. In particular, he pushed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to assist him in dealing with the threat from neighboring Afghanistan and its favorite guest, Osama bin Laden. Before Sharif could be compelled to act, he was thrown out of office by his own army. His replacement, Pervez Musharraf, pointedly refused to do anything to assist Clinton in dealing with these threats. Despite these and other diplomatic setbacks, terrorist cell after terrorist cell were destroyed across the world, and bomb plots against American embassies were thwarted. Because of security concerns, these victories were never revealed to the American people until very recently.

In America, few people heard anything about this. Clinton's dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the massive non-secret actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous "wag the dog" tactics. The TV networks actually broadcast clips of the movie "Wag The Dog" to accentuate the idea that everything the administration was doing was contrived fakery.

The bombing of the Sundanese factory at al-Shifa, in particular, drew wide condemnation from these quarters, despite the fact that the CIA found and certified VX nerve agent precursor in the ground outside the factory, despite the fact that the factory was owned by Osama bin Laden's Military Industrial Corporation, and despite the fact that the manager of the factory lived in bin Laden's villa in Khartoum. The book "Age of Sacred Terror" quantifies the al-Shifa issue thusly: "The dismissal of the al-Shifa attack as a scandalous blunder had serious consequences, including the failure of the public to comprehend the nature of the al Qaeda threat."

In Congress, Clinton was thwarted by the reactionary conservative majority in virtually every attempt he made to pass legislation that would attack al Qaeda and terrorism. His 1996 omnibus terror bill, which included many of the anti-terror measures we now take for granted after September 11, was withered almost to the point of uselessness by attacks from the right; Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were openly dismissive of the threats Clinton spoke of.

Clinton wanted to attack the financial underpinnings of the al-Qaeda network by banning American companies and individuals from dealing with foreign banks and financial institutions that al Qaeda was using for its money-laundering operations. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, killed Clinton's bill on this matter and called it "totalitarian." In fact, he was compelled to kill the bill because his most devoted patrons, the Enron Corporation and its criminal executives in Houston, were using those same terrorist financial networks to launder their own dirty money and rip off the Enron stockholders.

Just before departing office, Clinton managed to make a deal with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to have some twenty nations close tax havens used by al Qaeda. His term ended before the deal was sealed, and the incoming Bush administration acted immediately to destroy the agreement. According to Time magazine, in an article entitled "Banking on Secrecy" published in October of 2001, Bush economic advisors Larry Lindsey and R. Glenn Hubbard were urged by think tanks like the Center for Freedom and Prosperity to opt out of the coalition Clinton had formed. The conservative Heritage Foundation lobbied Bush's Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, to do the same. In the end, the lobbyists got what they wanted, and the Bush administration pulled America out of the plan. The Time article stated, "Without the world's financial superpower, the biggest effort in years to rid the world's financial system of dirty money was short-circuited."

This laundry list of partisan catastrophes goes on and on. Far from being inept on the matter of terrorism, Clinton was profoundly activist in his attempts to address terrorism. Much of his work was foiled by right-wing Congressional conservatives who, simply, refused to accept the fact that he was President. These men, paid to work for the public trust, spent eight years working diligently to paralyze any and all Clinton policies, including anti-terror initiatives that, if enacted, would have gone a long way towards thwarting the September 11 attacks. Beyond them lay the worthless television media, which ignored and spun the terrorist issue as it pursued salacious leaks from Ken Starr's office, leaving the American people drowning in a swamp of ignorance on a matter of deadly global importance...

Couple this with other facts about the Bush administration we now have in hand. The administration was warned about a massive terror plot in the months before September by the security services of several countries, including Israel, Egypt, Germany and Russia. CIA Director George Tenet delivered a specific briefing on the matter to the administration on August 8, 2001. The massive compendium of data on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda compiled by Sandy Berger, and delivered to Condoleezza Rice upon his departure, went completely and admittedly unread until the attacks took place. The attacks themselves managed, for over an hour, to pierce the most formidable air defense system in the history of the Earth without a single fighter aircraft taking wing until the catastrophe was concluded...

Had the Bush administration not continued this pattern of gross partisan ineptitude and heeded the blitz of domestic and international warnings, instead of trooping off to Texas for a month-long vacation, had Bush's National Security Advisor done one hour's worth of her homework, we probably would not be in the grotesque global mess that currently envelops us. Never forget that many of the activists who pushed throughout the 1990s for the annihilation of all things Clinton are now foursquare in charge of the country today.  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 comments links to this post

  E pur si muove!

The Man loads his guns against the 20th Century, Charles Darwin, and heliocentricism. Although not necessarily in that order.

Vatican City, Aug. 21--Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a new director of the Vatican Observatory, replacing the Rev. George Coyne, a long-serving Jesuit astronomer and a vocal opponent of "intelligent design" theory.

It was unclear if the replacement of Coyne, the observatory's director since 1978, reflected a sense of disapproval within the Vatican over his opposition to intelligent design -- the idea that the world is too complex to have been created by natural events alone.

Coyne has frequently attacked the theory as a "religious movement" lacking scientific merit. He could not be reached for comment...

In his staunch defense of evolution, Coyne, 73, has frequently crossed swords with Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, a former protégé and close adviser to Benedict whose support of intelligent design has been instrumental in introducing the theory into Catholic discourse.

The clash opened a divide between Vatican scientists who support Charles Darwin's theory and prominent theologians who believe evolution has been exaggerated to mount ideological attacks to disprove the existence of a creator-God...

In early September, Benedict will conduct a weekend seminar on the impact Darwin's theory has on the church's teaching of Creation. Schonborn, who has described evolution as "incompatible" with church teachings, will speak at the event, along with evolution advocate Peter Schuster, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Other speakers at the event include the Rev. Paul Erbrich, emeritus professor of natural philosophy from the University of Munich, who has described evolution as a "fundamentally inadequate" explanation of the origins of life; and Robert Spaemann, a conservative German philosopher who has challenged "evolutionism," or the philosophical applications of Darwin's theory.

He also sez Gallileo deserved the Inquisition, which was "reasonable and just" in its actions towards him (Joseph Ratzinger, Corriere della Sera, March 30, 1990; 30 Dias, January 1993, p. 34) , too.

"...and yet, it moves," he was heard to say under his breath.



Oh, by the way, notice here ye Faithful:

Fair Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, economic, democratic, and social justice issues, etc. Here at Singularity a major focus is also education about the natural world, too, so you're going to see a lot of science education too. Incidently, most of this science was funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  No Glasnost for You

Transparency bill subjected to secrecy
By AIMEE CURL
August 16, 2006
A bill to promote government transparency faces an uncertain future because of a far-from-transparent hold placed upon it in the Senate.
An unknown number of senators have blocked legislation to create a public, searchable Web site of all federal grants and contracts. Senate rules permit any senator to anonymously block consideration of a bill on the floor, effectively killing the measure.
“Hopefully the person or persons blocking it will realize it’s important to promote transparency and not secrecy in government,” said John Hart, spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., the bill’s sponsor.
Supporters of the measure had hoped to bring it to the Senate floor before lawmakers left Washington for the August recess. Hart noted that the bill has a bipartisan list of prominent co-sponsors including: Senate President Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and possible presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The bill was approved July 27 by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee...

This story just keeps getting better. It turns out a coalition of conservative and liberal bloggers is working to try to figure out who's holding the Bill up.

Assuming, of course, the secret blockader would admit to not supporting it...

Who's trying to stop the government from telling its citizens where their tax dollars are being spent? Help find out.

Just before the August recess, the Senate was set to vote on a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts. Envisioned as a Google-like website, it would provide free, immediate access the information, which can be alarmingly difficult to obtain.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the measure July 27th, and S.2590 seemed to be speeding on its way to full Senate passage when, in the dark of night, an unknown Senator placed a "secret hold" on the bill. According to Senate rules, the bill will never come to a vote as long as the hold continues.

So who's the culprit?

Since he/she is unlikely to fess up, bloggers from the left and right have united in the effort of eliminating suspects one by one. The only way to do this is to call your Senator's offices up and get an answer...

Good luck finding this Reptilican or DINOcrat, girls and boys, because it's not real likely they'll confess.  ¶ 8:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "What you don't know won't hurt them"

Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist
The Bush doctrine of ignorance

...Last week, The Washington Post ran a fascinating story based on a report from the National Security Archive, a research library at George Washington University. According to the report, the Bush administration has been blacking out previously public documents on the nation's strategic military capabilities. They are doing this, they say, in the name of national security. Got a question on the Minuteman missile? Tough. Curious about the Titan II? Too bad.

Now maybe you wonder what the problem is. This is sensitive information we're talking about, right? Can't have that falling into just anybody's hands, right?

The thing is, it's already in "anybody's" hands: it dates back half a century to the Cold War. We're talking about memos, charts and papers that have over the years been cited in open congressional hearings, reported in newspapers, used in history books. We're talking about information our government long ago deemed innocuous enough to provide even to its former enemy, the Soviet Union.

And now — "now!" — we're supposed to believe it's suddenly so sensitive it has to be classified Top Secret? Please.

This is a classic case of locking the barn after the horse has escaped — and died of old age. More to the point, it is a classic and absurd example of the present regime's mania for secrecy, its obsessive need to control what, when, how and why you and I learn about its activities.

Anyone who doesn't see a pattern here has not been paying attention. From its 18-hour blackout of news that the vice president had shot a man, to its paying a newspaper columnist to write favorable pieces, to its habit of putting out video press releases disguised as TV news, to its penchant for stamping top secret on anything that doesn't move fast enough, this administration has repeatedly shown contempt for the right of the people to know what's going on. At a time when information is more readily available than ever, this government is working like 1952 to enforce ignorance.

And the people, too many of them, shrug and say okey-dokey. As if we learned nothing from Abscam, Iran-contra, Vietnam and Watergate. As if it's OK for an arrogant and paternalistic government to decide for us what we get to know.

Well, it's not. An informed electorate is the lifeblood of democracy, the ultimate check on despotic ambitions.

One wonders if most people get this. One suspects that most people do not. How can you get it and not be outraged? How can you get it and not feel fear? Apparently, some of us don't understand the stakes here.

It's not just information they're trying to control.  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  DINOcrats by Any Other Name

Just because you should be aware of these "democratic" sources when they're quoted in Pravda:

The Top 10 Corporate Democrats-For-Hire
By Russ Baker, AlterNet
Posted on August 24, 2006, Printed on August 27, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/40482/

...While Lieberman is best known outside of Washington for his neocon views, he's famous in the capital for his undying support for corporate causes. There are countless examples: Remember Lieberman's role in blocking the reforms of stock option accounting that former SEC chair Arthur Levitt was trying to enact? This was a question of honest accounting that became part and parcel of the corporate corruption scandals of recent years, and Lieberman was a champion of the wrong side.

Beyond that, Lieberman happily has done the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies and many others, thus establishing an unsavory underside to his more admirable record on environmental and other issues. And of course, his support of and continued rationalization of the Iraq invasion, like many of Lieberman's other stances, has served chiefly to benefit large corporations, in this case the "national security/homeland defense" industry that got a huge boost from Bush's reckless military adventurism. It's no great surprise to learn that Karl Rove called Lieberman the other day after his loss, and described him as a "friend."

Lieberman and his defenders have tried to portray his brand of politics as "centrism." But it has little to do with mainstream voters and much to do with the money culture of Washington of which many Democrats have become a part. And yet, Ralph Nader is wrong in his blanket condemnations of Democrats: You still are more likely to find someone willing to stand up to the big money boys among Democrats than Republicans. But the gap is narrowing. Voters sense it...

We scrutinized scores of Washington Dems and found many ensconced in firms working to advance corporate agendas that don't look that different from policy we see emanating from the Bush administration. To be sure, many of these people have redeeming qualities, represent some admirable causes as well, and may personally harbor inclinations for the greater good. Yet, in trying to earn a handsome living in Washington, they apparently do what a person's gotta do. Can political success and influence be attained without working for The Man? Let's defer that debate for another time and start with a few facts.

First, let's check in with Mike McCurry, President Clinton's former press secretary. He's a partner at the firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc., and serves as chairman of Hands Off the Internet -- an outfit created by telecom companies such as AT&T and BellSouth which, paradoxically, want to put their hands ON the internet by creating what amounts to internal tariffs on internet traffic for large downloads and such. The hands that are supposed to stay off are those of regulators or legislators who want to keep the internet free.

Want Clinton? Over at a "strategic communications" company founded in 2001, you've got enough Friends of Bubba to fill a VW bug. There's McCurry's successor as Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart, and Al Gore's top strategists Carter Eskew and Michael Feldman. There's Howard Wolfson, former spokesman for Hillary Clinton and executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. And Joel Johnson, senior adviser for policy and communications to President Clinton.

When an election pops up, nearly the entire top brass rush to work on it. Lockhart and Wolfson, for example, took leaves in 2004 to work on the Kerry campaign and at the DNC. Johnson went from another firm to the Kerry campaign, then joined Glover Park.This mixture of politics and business seems to be working, because in 2005, the firm was ranked the fastest-growing private company in the District of Columbia.

What business, you ask? Even before Glover Park, Eskew, who has done media work for Sens. Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman, and Tom Harkin, and is close to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, was criticized for his work providing media advice to the tobacco industry. This time around, Eskew has been working again for Lieberman.

Among Glover Park's clients: Rupert Murdoch, who paid Glover Park about $200,000 for work to block TV ratings changes that could harm ad revenues at his Fox Broadcasting (the attempt was unsuccessful). Glover also got a large retainer for PR work and organizing groups against the plan (including the Don't Count Us Out coalition, which initially gave the impression it was an independent group representing the interests of people of color but turns out to represent mostly one Australian media buccaneer by the initials R.M.) Is it a coincidence that Murdoch's New York Post went from gleefully pillorying Hillary to praising her and attacking her critics and opponents?

Other firm clients have included the government of Turkey; Think About It (another faux-grassroots outfit waging an unsuccessful campaign to allow casino gambling in Maine); Microsoft (handled media inquiries about Microsoft's ties to Jack Abramoff's lobbying team); the Pentagon; Asbestos Study Group (an industry coalition formed to fight for limits on asbestos-related lawsuits); the Coalition to Preserve DSHEA (wants to continue making health claims for food supplements without scientific backing; multilevel marketing firms love this, most health and consumer groups don't); and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), undoubtedly big fans of making prescription drugs more affordable...

Russ Baker goes on to name a whole DINOcratic hit list, people that have worked for everyone from Jimmy Carter to Al Gore to John Kerry, and all their tight affiliations with all those oil-and-war profiteers bound up with the Carlyle Group.

Without, of course, invoking the tinfoil that people put on when they hear the name of the Carlyle Group.  ¶ 2:21 PM 1 comments links to this post

  When Dear Leader Would Rather Provide for his Base

WASHINGTON — Michigan has been shaping up as one of the few bright spots for Republicans in the coming elections, with the GOP hoping to strip Democrats of the governor's office and a U.S. Senate seat.

But in an unusual development, prominent Republicans there are complaining that President Bush needs to become more engaged in a top issue driving the election: the declining fortunes of the state's auto industry.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos lashed out at the White House this week for not having set up a long-promised meeting with executives of the Big Three automakers, which are being squeezed by high healthcare costs and shrinking market share.

"We're being ignored here in Michigan by the White House, and it has got to stop," DeVos, who is challenging Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, told reporters.

"It is wrong, and the behavior is inexcusable," DeVos said in a written statement Thursday. "The president needs to meet with the Big Three, and it must happen soon. Jobs are at stake."

An aide to Rep. Joseph Knollenberg (R-Mich.) said her boss "strongly suggested" to Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, that the White House meet with Detroit automakers as soon as possible. State GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis said Friday that he delivered a similar message to Rove.

"We want to get the president and the White House engaged in addressing the unique issues that affect Michigan … and work with us to come up with some solutions," Anuzis said in an interview.

He said DeVos was "expressing some of the frustration that is being felt here in Michigan amongst all voters..."

...Bush himself made clear in January that he was not inclined to bail out troubled U.S. auto companies.

"I think it's very important for the market to function," he said, adding that companies needed to manufacture "a product that's relevant." His remarks, to the Wall Street Journal, provoked loud complaints from Michigan Democrats.

Why worry about voters when you've got Diebold?

Additionally, it seems that Carlyle Group affiliate and Saudi Royal minion, Citigroup, among other Carlyle sharks are circling affiliates are angling for a piece of Detroit action:

...Mr. Rubin, a director and chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup, said in a letter released Friday that he wanted to avoid any potential conflicts that could be raised by his presence on Ford’s board, which he joined six years ago.

It came as Ford’s chief executive, William Clay Ford Jr., is pondering a wide variety of steps that are aimed at reversing Ford’s losses, resizing the company and enabling it to withstand brutal industry competition.

Those steps could include finding buyers for luxury brands like Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin. That task could fall to Citigroup as well as another financial adviser, Goldman Sachs, which like Citigroup has a longstanding association with Ford.

Last month, Mr. Ford hired Kenneth Leet, a former executive with Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, as a strategic adviser to lead the company’s review and make recommendations on steps — like alliances with other auto companies and the sale of its units — that the company needed to take to restructure..

People briefed on Ford’s activities said the company’s future relationship with both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup could be more far-reaching than individual deals had been in the past.

Mr. Rubin’s resignation came in a letter Thursday to Mr. Ford. In it, he said Citigroup’s “multifaceted relationship with Ford could raise a question whether my relationship with Ford and Citigroup creates an appearance of conflict...”

He joined 6 years ago? About the time Ford decided to go all out for SUVs and trucks, despite the specter of energy problems on the horizon.

How convenient for the Company.  ¶ 8:23 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Space Strategery

Commander Codpiece's vision for space co-ordinates the same great balancing act going to the Moon, Mars, and the ethane oceans of Titan that we're used to seeing here at home.

...But the budget for space station research has been cut dramatically over the past year, and is due to be slashed even more deeply next year. Starting with Sunday's scheduled launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, NASA is turning its attention to flying up hardware rather than doing science.

Some observers say that NASA now sees the orbital outpost as a $100 billion white elephant to be finished, then quickly left behind in America's new push to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Those observers, who include scientists as well as policy experts, say NASA is acting as if the station was an obligation rather than an opportunity.

"It's almost as if the space station is an albatross," said Keith Cowing, who worked on the initial designs for the space station in the 1990s while at NASA and now monitors the agency through his Web site, NASA Watch. "It's almost like NASA has corporate attention-deficit disorder."

"The numbers show continuing decline for the research part of NASA," said Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "There's not much on the plus side for science."

Is the space station really worth all that money, and all that risk to astronauts' lives?

Even NASA admits that the station isn’t fully living up to the promise right now, due to cost overruns, construction delays and the repercussions of the 2003 Columbia tragedy. The agency has had to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from space station research to its new moon effort, initiated in 2004. And there are plenty of blank spaces in its plan to use the space station after 2010, when NASA is due to finish construction and retire the space shuttle fleet...

...The science that's due to be done in the years ahead will focus on how humans can handle the health effects of microgravity, radiation exposure and other aspects of the space environment.

For decades, researchers have known that astronauts tend to lose bone mass and muscle tone in space, that they don't sleep as well and that their immune systems may be compromised. Until scientists learn how to counter those effects, humans won't be able to take on the longer-duration missions envisioned in NASA's exploration blueprint. So NASA is shifting its research agenda to figure out what it will take for astronauts to travel safely to the moon and Mars.

"What we are doing is using an occupational health model, where we have standards that we have to maintain," Walz explained. "We have to maintain the health of the astronauts to these standards..."

Now, it seems more than a little bit oddball that while they're interested in occupational and environmental health in space, down here:

...The reactionary campaign against knowledge and information is reaching frightening new heights.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been ordered by the White House to "shut down [its] libraries, end public access to research materials and box up unique collections on the assumption that Congress will not reverse President Bush’s proposed budget reductions." Fifteen states will lose library service immediately, the rest will follow, and the public is to be turned away as soon as possible.

Unsurprisingly, EPA scientists are protesting, saying that the lack of access to data will impair their research and scientific capabilities. The Administration says its plan is to "centralize" control of all data; EPA scientists say the real goal is to "suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics." The Administration is not yet burning books, but they are getting very close.

They're not much fonder of telling the truth -- the whole truth -- over at the Defense Department. The Department has refused to complete congressionally ordered studies of the potential security threat to radar systems from wind turbines. Until it finishes that study, Defense is blocking all new wind turbines that might help reduce our dependence on what the President calls our "addiction" to oil and natural gas "often from insecure places."

The Sierra Club sued and demanded that Defense finish the study. (Of course, if wind turbines actually were a threat to our air defense systems, you would think that the Department of Defense would be rushing to prove it and make us safer by dealing with the thousands that already exist.)

But Defense has refused to respond to the Club's motion. Now, Defense has informed us that it will miss the 60-day deadline for that response and will need an additional five weeks to answer the complaint. In other words, the Department claims that it needs more than three months to tell a Court why it cannot finish what was supposed to be a six-month study. This is giving stonewalling a whole new meaning.

Nor will the Department of Defense tell us how many wind projects it has stopped, even though it has issued "don't proceed" orders to each one, so the information is obviously available. According to media reports, at least 15 wind farm proposals in the Midwest alone have already been shut down. The list of stalled projects includes one outside of Bloomington, Illinois, that would have been the nation's largest source of wind energy -- generating enough electricity to power 120,000 homes in the Chicago area...

Billions to finish a space station that won't be used for science, except maybe to examine the effects of microgravity on human guinea pigs. Because astronauts going to Mars might be away for a couple of years and not so easy to examine. Now that fits with their desire to end environmental research and halt work on alternative energy sources perfectly!  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Who is Susan Dudley, and Why Does Mordor Love Her?



...Susan Dudley was nominated by the president in July to head OIRA, an office in the White House with broad power over federal regulatory policy, yet Dudley spent her time at the Mercatus Center opposing health, safety and environmental regulations. She has opposed lowering the threshold for arsenic in drinking water and closing loopholes in the Davis Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay locally prevailing wages and benefits on public works projects.

Dudley has utilized cost-benefit analysis as a weapon to undermine or kill regulations that industry opposes. She even claims that cost-benefit studies demonstrate that OSHA regulations - many of which are widely recognized as protecting the lives and safety of countless workers - have not had a "substantial impact."

Dudley applies the same logic to the public's right to know about toxic chemicals. According to her public interest comments, while it may be an "intuitively desirable social goal" to provide information to the public, it costs money and may even "confuse, rather than inform" the public. The costs must be outweighed by the social goal, explains Dudley, and even when this is the case it does not suggest that more information available to the public is in order.

Were Dudley to be confirmed as the next regulatory czar, she would likely review an EPA proposal that would undermine the Toxics Release Inventory, the premier right-to-know program about chemical information.

Dudley's championing of industry at times comes across as frighteningly naive. Arguing against regulation requiring air bags in vehicles, which have clearly been shown to save the lives of drivers and passages, she writes that, "if air bags save lives and consumers demand them," then the auto industry would have installed them without federal regulations.

In addition to her pro-industry work at the Mercatus Center, Dudley also once worked for OIRA, reviewing environmental regulations, and was widely criticized by environmental groups for her decisions there.

A little more on Susan Dudley here.

Also, Public Citizen has some things to say:

The announcement last night of the White House’s intention to nominate Susan Dudley as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget represents another attack by the Bush administration on the government’s ability to hold industry accountable and keep Americans safe.

Although the OIRA is little known to the public, it has enormous power to weaken, delay and eliminate hard-won regulations designed to protect the public in the workplace, on our roads and in our homes. It reviews protections instituted by watchdog offices such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - everything from auto safety standards to limits on industrial chemicals and air and water pollutants. Under this administration, OIRA has weakened these already troubled agencies. If Dudley is confirmed by the Senate, she will further strip them of their ability to stand up to government secrecy, politicization and corporate interests.

Throughout her career, Dudley has consistently fought against government safeguards and advocated a radical, hands-off approach to regulating corporations. As director of regulatory studies at the industry-funded Mercatus Center, Dudley has sought to strike down countless environmental, health and safety rules and found willing allies in the administration. She has opposed such things as EPA’s attempts to keep arsenic out of our drinking water and to lower levels of disease-causing smog. She has questioned NHTSA’s life-saving airbag regulations and the Department of Transportation’s hours-of-service rules to keep sleep-deprived truck drivers off our roads. She has championed energy deregulation, which has led to skyrocketing prices and little consumer relief during record-setting heat waves. The list goes on and on...

This is one evil woman. I think the tarantula is probably being compared unfairly.  ¶ 9:47 PM 2 comments links to this post

  All Over Again

Firedoglake's Christy Hardin Smith notes that Dafna Linzer notes the author of the Congressional Reptilican report complaining about the CIA's failure to unearth WMDs in Iran ...was Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration’s former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton had been highly influential in the crafting of a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

We knew the fix was in.

Now we know it was the Head Polisher of the Moustache of Sauron hisself shining up the knob of the War Machine.

Christy goes on to say:

Look, it’s our buddy Fred Fleitz, now working for the House Intel Committee (read: now with his ass planted firmly there to keep an eagle eye on Pete Hoekstra for the Cheney/Addington faction) who was the person who wrote the report. Shocking. Shocking I tell you.

And sloppy reporting by the NYTimes to miss this element, given Fleitz’ heightened profile after the Valerie Plame Wilson outing and his former hatchet man status as John Bolton’s former number two when Bolton was at State. Especially given Fleitz record as a hardliner when it comes to Iran — and the questions of his involvement in some other odd moments in Bolton history.

But how much can we count on anything Fleitz says in the report after what, I’m sure, was an exhaustive investigation involving a gathering of all evidence and facts — because he’s not the sort of fellow who would ever cook the books to support an assertion and and outcome without the underlying facts, right?.:

"[The report’s] authors did not interview intelligence officials."

Oh yeah, no stone unturned. No assertion unchallenged. Every fact backed up in triplicate. Not so much. Jeebus, do these people learn nothing?

Sure.

They learned they can generate endless cash by scapegoating an entire nation and that a fearful nation will roll over if they press all the right buttons.

They learned that the media loves mass murder, as long as it looks like fireworks and shark-sleek ordinance and a George Lucas production.

They learned that when they're about to loose their shirts, up the ante on the next bet, and the size of the pot will make all the other Washington players follow like zombies smelling fresh brains.  ¶ 10:57 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "...Maybe if we ignore them, they'll just go away."

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: August 24, 2006

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.

“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.

That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution...

...The grants are awarded under the National Smart Grant program, established this year by Congress. (Smart stands for Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent.)

The program provides $4,000 grants to third- or fourth-year, low-income students majoring in physical, life or computer sciences; mathematics; technology; engineering; or foreign languages deemed “critical” to national security.

The list of eligible majors (which is online at ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0606A.pdf) is drawn from the Education Department’s “Classification of Instructional Programs,” or CIP (pronounced “sip”), a voluminous and detailed classification of courses of study, arranged in a numbered system of sections and subsections.

Part 26, biological and biomedical sciences, has a number of sections, each of which has one or more subsections. Subsection 13 is ecology, evolution, systematics and population biology. This subsection itself has 10 sub-subsections. One of them is 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, “the scientific study of the genetic, developmental, functional, and morphological patterns and processes, and theoretical principles; and the emergence and mutation of organisms over time.”

Though references to evolution appear in listings of other fields of biological study, the evolutionary biology sub-subsection is missing from a list of “fields of study” on the National Smart Grant list — there is an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology and biological oceanography) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology/limnology).

Students cannot simply list something else on an application form, said Mr. Nassirian of the registrars’ association. “Your declared major maps to a CIP code,” he said...

Mr. Nassirian said people at the Education Department had described the omission as “a clerical mistake.” But it is “odd,” he said, because applying the subject codes “is a fairly mechanical task. It is not supposed to be the subject of any kind of deliberation.”

“I am not at all certain that the omission of this particular major is unintentional,” he added. “But I have to take them at their word.”

Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. “It’s just awfully coincidental,” said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.

Jeremy Gunn, who directs the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the change was not immediately reversed “we will certainly pursue this.”

Dr. Rissing said removing evolutionary biology from the list of acceptable majors would discourage students who needed the grants from pursuing the field, at a time when studies of how genes act and evolve are producing valuable insights into human health.

“This is not just some kind of nicety,” he said. “We are doing a terrible disservice to our students if this is yet another example of making sure science doesn’t offend anyone.”

You might want to read what Pharyngula says about The Republican War on Science.

I know what this guy says.  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Cooking Intelligence Dishes from the Same Stovepipe

This week we observed the spectacle of Dear Leader telling us like he told us before that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda's attack on 9/11.

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

Nobody except for Dear Leader, anyway.

Now we find the Grand Oil Party is getting a bit huffy nobody- especially the CIA- is taking their gauge of Iran's weapons of mass destruction very seriously either.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

Some policy makers have accused intelligence agencies of playing down Iran’s role in Hezbollah’s recent attacks against Israel and overestimating the time it would take for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

The complaints, expressed privately in recent weeks, surfaced in a Congressional report about Iran released Wednesday. They echo the tensions that divided the administration and the Central Intelligence Agency during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The criticisms reflect the views of some officials inside the White House and the Pentagon who advocated going to war with Iraq and now are pressing for confronting Iran directly over its nuclear program and ties to terrorism, say officials with knowledge of the debate.

The dissonance is surfacing just as the intelligence agencies are overhauling their procedures to prevent a repeat of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate — the faulty assessment that in part set the United States on the path to war with Iraq.

The new report, from the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, portrayed Iran as a growing threat and criticized American spy agencies for cautious assessments about Iran’s weapons programs. “Intelligence community managers and analysts must provide their best analytical judgments about Iranian W.M.D. programs and not shy away from provocative conclusions or bury disagreements in consensus assessments,” the report said…

Where would be be without Pravda?

Or Dick Cheney, ready to stovepipe the imaginary cause again directly with the CIA whether they believe it or not?

Let me suggest to those about to be burnt by this government of Harkonnens what Frank Herbert said:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

  ¶ 4:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Ghoul Entrepreneurs Working the Free Market



WASHINGTON - A leading medical firm has quietly recalled hundreds of human tissue products destined for transplants around the nation that were supplied by a North Carolina body parts broker believed to have a tainted history.

The broker used an unsterile embalming room to carve up dozens of corpses to procure tissue, a Raleigh funeral home director said Tuesday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down the body broker on Friday, but refuses to say how many people may have received potentially risky tissue.

It is the second scandal in less than a year in the booming tissue transplant industry. Cadaver tissue is used in more than a million transplants each year in such routine operations as back surgery and knee repairs. While such donated tissue does tremendous good, it is also little regulated, a three-month Associated Press investigation found earlier this year.

Improperly processed or poorly tested tissue can lead to infections like hepatitis or AIDS or even death. Last year a scandal unfolded around Biomedical Tissue Services, a New Jersey company accused of using stolen bodies and of shipping nearly 20,000 potentially tainted body parts.

Federal authorities kept the North Carolina episode quiet until late last Friday, when the FDA shut down Donor Referral Services of Raleigh, N.C. The FDA said the company, run by Philip Guyett, had "serious deficiencies" in its processing, donor screening and record-keeping. The government accused him of altering records to overlook such problems as cancer or drug use by the deceased donor.

But on July 6, AlloSource of Centennial, Colo., began its own recall of about 300 Guyett-provided transplant parts that went to a company it had acquired, an AlloSource spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Guyett, 38, hung up on a reporter trying to reach him for comment on Friday.

The FDA won't say how many potentially tainted body parts might have made it to hospitals for transplant. But two companies doing business with Guyett told The Associated Press Tuesday that they know of at least 60 bodies cut up and at least 300 body parts that were recalled. And those firms were not the only business associates that Guyett had, they said...

My mother had ghouls calling her up when my father died trying to get "skin grafts for burn patients" from him even though he wasn't an organ donor and had, among other problems, malignant melanoma.

She hung up on the bastards after trying to explain to them he had skin cancer as well as emphysema and heart problems.

They still badgered her to sign over body parts, because she's old and (they thought) alone.

On the other hand, I enjoy hanging up on any ghouls or reptilicans.  ¶ 10:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Howard Dean Says It

Right here.

And it's about time somebody did.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Harbingers of the Change

A couple of weeks ago it was reported here that "dead zones" similar to the excessive eutrophication area in the Gulf of Mexico were starting to appear off of the Northwest Coast of the United States.

Eutrophication is normally observed in isolated bodies of freshwater that get too polluted with fertilizers and sewage to sustain normal life.

In the oceans, this started off the coast of Lousiana during the summers of the late 20th century. As the Mississippi washes nutrients into the Gulf, it creates planktonic blooms that deplete large areas offshore of oxygen and the lving things that require oxygen to survive. What takes over? Anaerobes and facultative anaerobes, bacteria that can survive quite nicely without oxygen.

Today in The New York Pravda we're treated with skepticism that this really matters.

… There is little dispute that the dead zone exists; the disagreement centers on whether it matters much. In a state where fishermen are already accustomed to strict regulation, fights with environmentalists and attention from academics, many of them are having none of the notion that there is a larger problem.

“They say it’s global warming and it’s Bush’s fault, and it just goes on and on and on,” said Bill Wechter, 53, a crabber who said he had been working here since 1978, had 500 traps stretching north from Newport and had suffered no losses. “Everybody’s guessing.”

This is the fifth straight year in which a dead zone has appeared here, but scientists say that this one is by far the biggest, covering as much as 1,200 square miles, and that the oxygen levels have been startlingly low in places.

Those low levels are caused by persistent northerly winds that push nutrient-rich water into shallow areas — a process known as upwelling — without being offset by southerly winds that typically flush out the water and effectively keep it from becoming overfertilized. Dead zones are common around the world, with the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Erie, Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound experiencing them on occasion. But most often they are caused by local pollution problems, including runoff containing fertilizer or sewage.

Adding the recent observations off Newport to findings that date from 2002, when a summertime dead zone was first documented here, some scientists say changes in wind patterns could indicate a growing disparity between rising land temperatures and cool ocean temperatures. Such a condition has long been predicted in some regional models on the effects of global warming, said John A. Barth, an Oregon State oceanographer who is among a group of scientists of various disciplines studying the Oregon coast.

But the fishermen say they know the ocean best: they spend their lives working it rather than writing research papers about it. Changes in ocean conditions simply require adjustment, they say, whether that means shortening lines or fishing closer in or farther out…

The multimillion dollar crabbing industry much prefers driving with its eyes closed, and propaganda fluff pieces like this keep the pesky civilians, scientists, and regulators away quite nicely.

While the oceans become a cesspool.  ¶ 9:30 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Robofighter

Make a computer smart enough and it'll do your thinking for you.

Of course, if your computer is a gun already, it might be smart enough to relieve you of your command.

Lockheed Martin has taken the wraps off studies of unmanned derivatives of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as it mounts a concerted campaign to establish itself in the unmanned systems market. Concepts studied by Lockheed's Skunk Works include both optionally piloted and dedicated unmanned versions of the JSF.

"Two to three years ago we started looking at what could be done with the F-35," says Frank Mauro, deputy director unmanned aeronautical systems. The Skunk Works has taken both the optionally piloted and dedicated unmanned JSFs through concept design, he says, and is waiting until all three manned variants have flown before pursuing the idea.

"We have put it on the side until the F-35 flies," says Mauro. "For now the customers' focus is on getting the three variants flying. We will bring it back out when we get enough customer interest." A JSF derivative could be a follow-on to the recently terminated Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) programme, he says.



It would be relatively easy to operate the F-35 unmanned, "as there is enough intelligence in the systems", says Mauro, but simply removing the cockpit "would not change the cost much". A fuel tank could replace the coc­kpit, extending range, but the cost of the propulsion, avionics and sensor systems "do not change from manned to unmanned", he says.

To reduce cost, Lockheed has developed a concept of operations in which four unmanned JSFs would be controlled by two manned F-35s, or F-22s, sharing sensor information via an airborne datalink. This would allow the sensors to be removed from the unmanned F-35s, which would be used as weapon carriers, reducing cost to about 72% that of the manned aircraft - "30-35% of the cost is in the sensors", Mauro says.

Lockheed proposed a similar concept based on the F-16 in the early stages of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) technology demonstration programme that led to J-UCAS, but DARPA preferred a clean-sheet approach and awarded contracts to Boeing for the X-45 and Northrop Grumman for the X-47.

Boeing built and flew the X-45A UCAV demonstrator for DARPA, but the J-UCAS programme was terminated earlier this year before the X-45C and X-47B had flown.

In other words, Lockheed likely had a better propo$al even a Congre$$man could appreciate.

Thanks to DefenseTech for the link.

Don't forget: Skynet's already flying.

There are days when I wonder whether the combination of a neocortex and an opposable thumb is a viable evolutionary strategy for primates. The issue is whether there is enough neocortex in enough variants of our species to guarantee survival, propagation, and continued development in a changing world. Certainly not in Washington D.C.  ¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Great March Backwards

Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Published: August 21, 2006

Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds.

It's an awful idea. Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse. But what's really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government. I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920's, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

And privatized tax collection is only part of the great march backward.

In the bad old days, government was a haphazard affair. There was no bureaucracy to collect taxes, so the king subcontracted the job to private "tax farmers," who often engaged in extortion. There was no regular army, so the king hired mercenaries, who tended to wander off and pillage the nearest village. There was no regular system of administration, so the king assigned the task to favored courtiers, who tended to be corrupt, incompetent or both.

Modern governments solved these problems by creating a professional revenue department to collect taxes, a professional officer corps to enforce military discipline, and a professional civil service. But President Bush apparently doesn't like these innovations, preferring to govern as if he were King Louis XII.

So the tax farmers are coming back, and the mercenaries already have. There are about 20,000 armed "security contractors" in Iraq, and they have been assigned critical tasks, from guarding top officials to training the Iraqi Army.

Like the mercenaries of old, today's corporate mercenaries have discipline problems. "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath," declared a U.S. officer last year.

And armed men operating outside the military chain of command have caused at least one catastrophe. Remember the four Americans hung from a bridge? They were security contractors from Blackwater USA who blundered into Falluja — bypassing a Marine checkpoint — while the Marines were trying to pursue a methodical strategy of pacifying the city. The killing of the four, and the knee-jerk reaction of the White House — which ordered an all-out assault, then called it off as casualties mounted — may have ended the last chance of containing the insurgency.

Yet Blackwater, whose chief executive is a major contributor to the Republican Party, continues to thrive. The Department of Homeland Security sent heavily armed Blackwater employees into New Orleans immediately after Katrina.

To whom are such contractors accountable? Last week a judge threw out a jury's $10 million verdict against Custer Battles, a private contractor that was hired, among other things, to provide security at Baghdad's airport. Custer Battles has become a symbol of the mix of cronyism, corruption and sheer amateurishness that doomed the Iraq adventure — and the judge didn't challenge the jury's finding that the company engaged in blatant fraud.

But he ruled that the civil fraud suit against the company lacked a legal basis, because as far as he could tell, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, wasn't "an instrumentality of the U.S. government." It wasn't created by an act of Congress; it wasn't a branch of the State Department or any other established agency.

So what was it? Any premodern monarch would have recognized the arrangement: in effect, the authority was a personal fief run by a viceroy answering only to the ruler. And since the fief operated outside all the usual rules of government, the viceroy was free to hire a staff of political loyalists lacking any relevant qualifications for their jobs, and to hand out duffel bags filled with $100 bills to contractors with the right connections.

Tax farmers, mercenaries and viceroys: why does the Bush administration want to run a modern superpower as if it were a 16th-century monarchy? Maybe people who've spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can't grasp the idea of governing well. Or maybe it's cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

But the price is enormous. This administration has thrown away centuries of lessons about how to make government work. No wonder it has failed at everything except fearmongering.  ¶ 8:42 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Gatekeepers

pessimist at the Left Coaster has as good a piece on Net Neutrality and what you're about to have wrung out of you as I've ever read.

Check it out. Thanks to Avedon for the link, too.  ¶ 8:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  They Take It All Back

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout
Documents Altered To Conceal Data

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006; Page A01

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. " . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before."

The report comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information. The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency had for years kept secret a reclassification program under which the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies removed thousands of records from public shelves...

The other Powers in the world know exactly what these numbers are; they've known for years. At one time this declassified information was freely given.

Why would this information remain secret?

When everyone else who has a nuclear missile knows it too?

I can still remember the uneasy look my father, a construction supervisor in the ******** [redacted at the request of my family] and veteran of the Korean War, had when he told me that as a result of the end of the cold war, hidden nuclear missile sites were being decomissioned, and that the local utility companies were inspecting them because they suddenly were responsible for them. Around *******. He'd seen them. Plural.

And that every city in America has them. Plural.

I wonder if some of those are reclassified now too? And I wonder what's in them?

But I know who they want to hide them from.  ¶ 4:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Eternal Sunshine and Golden Parachutes for the Spotless Mind

When people live together in societies, they need a medium of exchange. This evolved as the system we all know as capitalism, and it has the advantage of working more-or-less better than any other known economic system. Especially, as the Great Depression should have shown us, when it is regulated by the government.

Once again, the United States of Amnesia has done what it does best.

With apologies to the author for the condensation and clarification:

CEO President
Jane Smiley

In the late eighties, I wrote a novel called A Thousand Acres. Everyone thought it was about incest and "King Lear".

To me the theme concerned the transformation of the midwestern American landscape from a unique, diverse, and rather fragile natural ecosystem that supported methods of European animal and grain farming to a denuded and lifeless "food" factory in which money pushed every other consideration to the margins, or snuffed them out entirely.

My book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and made into a movie. American agriculture got worse.

In the early nineties, I wrote another novel about farming called Moo, a comic novel that took place on the campus of a land grant university. While researching Moo, I discovered BSE, which was only just then (1992) emerging in the UK as a relative of scrapie, a form of brain-wasting disease that occurs in sheep. As far as I know, the references to BSE in Moo were the first to appear in the US.

The characters in Moo discuss the practice of feeding cows, normally vegetarians, the animal byproducts of sheep farming. They are appalled. And it still seems like a no-brainer. If cows eat offal and then people eat cows, a certain proportion of people will become ill with sheep and cow diseases, and, voila, scrapie crossed two species barriers--to cows and to humans--because the agriculture corporations either didn't know what they were doing or didn't care. Nevertheless, American agriculture got worse.

After I left Iowa and started writing about other things, the ag companies… continued to perpetrate vicious idiocies, and to do so in a more and more aggressive manner, challenging the rights, and the abilities, of people in all parts of the world to have any say in the nature and composition of the food we put into our bodies. They have done so, as far as I can tell, solely for profit. They have exhibited greed that crosses over from mere selfish immoral criminality into actual insanity.

Here's an example. By the time I was writing A Thousand Acres, it had been apparent for some twenty-five or thirty years that insecticides and herbicides were contaminating the landscape and the water supply, killing off wildlife, destroying fertility in males and females of all species, and causing disease in the farmers themselves and their families. The common sense solution to this increasing problem would have been to acknowledge the destructive power of these unnatural chemicals, and to have shifted American agriculture away from their use. The ag companies, however, preferred to remake the ecosystem so that farmers would use more chemicals rather than fewer; they genetically modified seed to make it resistant to an herbicide, Round-up, that when applied would destroy every living plant around it except the proprietary seed plants also owned by the corporation that formulated Round-up…

…Here's what the big ag companies want to do--they want to own and contaminate the entire gene pool of all the world's food resources for their own profit and without the knowledge or input of anyone who will actually be eating the food or living in the world they create.

...The model, of course, is big tobacco. As was reaffirmed again this past week, big tobacco knew fifty years ago that there was nothing beneficial about their product. Tobacco is a bad plant, a bad industry, and a bad product. Faced with the truth, big tobacco changed their advertising , stonewalled, and lied in order to maintain profits. What big ag did not learn from the experiences of big tobacco was to first, do no harm. Rather, big ag learned to hide the harm it is doing and befuddle the lines of liability, as well as to force deregulation, to buy off the politicians and the researchers, and to present the world with a genetic fait accompli, a crime and a sin that cannot be undone. Sort of like the Iraq war.

Everyone knows at this point that Halliburton (that is, big war) and big oil were the prime movers in instigating the war in Iraq through their man Cheney and their poodle, Bush. And, of course, Halliburton and the other war industries and Exxon and the other oil companies have been the only ones to profit from the Iraq war. They have not sent members of their own families to fight; they have suffered no bombings of their own plants or their own homes. They thought they had a fool-proof plan for profits, and indeed, they did. We, the taxpayers, have paid for their adventure with money and lives. They have not gotten the Iraqi oil (let's say plan A), but they have driven up prices and profits (plan B). The president of Exxon is the happiest old man in the world, I am sure.

Big ag, big tobacco, big war, big oil, and their enablers on Wall Street always congratulate themselves on "wealth creation". This is what the "free market" does--it takes something that was supposedly worthless, like mountaintops in West Virginia or corn varieties in Mexico or oil deposits in Alaska, and gives them "value". But this is a fiction. The model here is big water. The earth abounds in rivers and lakes. Wealthy water companies (the water rights in my river are owned by a company in England that is now in trouble for mismanaging their own Thames) go to other countries and buy or take the water rights of those people and then sell them back to those very people at a price they can hardly afford. This is "wealth creation"--creating wealth for stockholders, even though they already have more wealth than they know what to do with, by stealing the resources of the poor and the powerless. The "free market" always talks about buying low and selling high, but it specializes in theft. And, as an alternative, if the "wealth creators" cannot use what you own, say a hardy seed that works well for your ecosystem, they will render it useless so that you will have to buy their seed just to live.

Given what these big corporations routinely do, we have to ask, are they filled and peopled from top to bottom by ruthless monsters who care nothing about others, and also nothing about the world that we live in? Are these CEOs and CFOs and COOs and managers and researchers and stockholders so beyond human that, let's say, the deaths in Iraq and the destitution of the farmers and the tumors and allergies and obesities of children, and the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the shifting of the Gulf Stream are, to them, just the cost of doing business? Or are they just beyond stupid and blind, so that they, alone among humans, have no understanding of the interconnectedness of all natural systems?

One thing you have to ask yourself, faced with American corporate culture, is, what is it about Americans, in particular, that makes them so indifferent to consequences, especially the consequence of doing harm to others, over and over and over? Why did those big tobacco folks persist, for fifty years, in poisoning their customers and attempting to get more customers?

When George Bush was elected, the big industries breathed a happy sigh. Finally, they had a "CEO president". The implication of that phrase was that Bush would know how to run the company, to reduce labor costs and outsource various services. The fact was that neither Bush nor Cheney had ever actually succeeded in business, but that was a detail. Failures though they were, they were steeped in corporate ways of thinking, and they owed a lot to big oil, big war, and big ag. They showed immediately that they knew how to do business in the corporate way by cheating in the 2000 election (let's call this "deregulating themselves and their governing behaviors"). This was the true mark of a "CEO President"--do what you can get away with, dare the others to stop you, act always as a predator rather than as a custodian of the common good, because according to theorists of the "free market", there is no common good. Thank you, Milton Friedman. And it doesn't matter how well or poorly they run the government. As they drive it into the ground, they are still acting as good CEOs in the American tradition, preparing their own golden parachutes, sticking it to the suckers (customers, suppliers, stockholders, citizens, soldiers), and treating the property of the corporation (for example the US Army) as their own private stock.

Deregulation has made this debacle.

…Is it the US that gives corporations a bad name, or corporations that give the US a bad name? In 1980, the Republicans invited the corporate elite to have it their way. The world we have now, violent and selfish and brutal, contaminated and in danger of environmental collapse, is the world they made, both by actually dismantling the regulatory environment and by letting powerful people get in the habit of thinking that doing whatever they felt like, no matter how grossly harmful, was their right and their privilege.

American corporations always defend their activities by pointing to how innovative they are. This is especially galling when the food companies and the ag companies do it, because they have no good innovations to offer and never have.

Since humans know how to feed themselves, the only thing that the ag companies can do is introduce deceptively marketed products and take for themselves money that might have gone to feeding someone. Oh, yeah, and they can irrevocably change the world so that all biodiversity is reduced and destroyed. Once again, you've got to ask, are they inhumanly evil or inhumanly short-sighted? Oh, well. They are always wrapping themselves in the flag, so it must be the American way.

And it is. American corporations are uniquely free to do business in an irresponsible manner because of what you might call a typo in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which uses the word "person" without defining it as a human being. Since then, corporations have repeatedly interpreted their personhood in their own favor--they get to have the rights that humans have, such as free political speech (bribing candidates with contributions), but none of the consequences (mortality, moral reciprocity, full liability for bad actions). The result is all around us and threatens to destroy us.

A hundred years ago, the rapaciousness of the business elite spawned a century of war and social conflict. The power of Socialism and Marxism was in the rage people feel when their means are stolen from them, when they are duped and fooled and used as cannon fodder by people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, when the world they live in grows more and more inhuman and self-evidently stupid.

That rage is growing now. Anarchists have been replaced by suicide bombers. Marxists have been replaced by Islamicists and lefty bloggers. But, of course Bush and Cheney and the capitalists have empowered their own opposition because the human pattern is the same. The war machine, as in Lebanon (epitomized by aerial destruction) is just as clumsy as it ever was. You cannot torment and injure and murder and disfigure people into liking or agreeing with you, only into going underground while they prepare their revenge. You cannot treat people, even people who don't speak your language or dress like you, as suckers and babies (as in, taking candy from a baby).

The average person knows this, but CEOs and CEO Presidents apparently do not. The fact is, the day Ronald Reagan was elected and the corporations decided to roll back the regulations that limited their power, greed, and egomania was the day they doomed themselves and all of us, because it was the day they began living the lie that there are no consequences to corporate activities. By deregulating themselves, they made sure only that the consequences of their misguided policies would be bigger--global climate change rather than higher gas prices, contaminated gene pools rather than lower profits from pesticides, global famine rather than localized corn blight, tens of thousands dead in Iraq rather than higher R and D costs, the death of the Ford motor company rather than a shift to less profitable, more fuel efficient cars.

The list is endless. And their defense of what they do gets harsher and more shrill. We are given to understand that if they don't have their way at this point, conflagration in the middle east--war with Iran, possibly nuclear--will result. What kind of person plans such a thing? Inhumanly callous or inhumanly stupid? We have our answer--a CEO President, someone who epitomises both qualities…

But how good are the golden parachutes when there is no place to land?

Where do they go, my little beotches?

  ¶ 1:27 PM 0 comments links to this post

  State of Nature

This ceasefire is beginning to look more like a reloading session.

Laura Rozen notes that:

Despite the ceasefire, Israel intends to kill Nasrallah. Israeli commander: “... In the long run, if we see Hezbollah rearming itself and running southern Lebanon, I believe the next round is coming.”

Larry Johnson:
Israel kidnaps elected official: The Palestinian's Deputy Prime Minister, Nasser Al Shaer was kidnapped by the Israeli army on Saturday, after hiding since the start of Israel’s Palestine offensive in June. He was seized in a raid at his home in the West Bank town on Ramallah.

Israel breaches ceasefire: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Israel’s latest attack on Lebanon a violation of the UN backed truce that ended the 34-day war. "The secretary-general is deeply concerned about a violation by the Israeli side of the cessation of hostilities as laid out in Security Council resolution 1701," a spokesman for Annan said in a statement posted on the United Nations Web site...

Israel had better stop listening to the NeoCons. Empire is no way to run a democracy, as people are increasingly concluding here. You've got to have the consent of the governed. If you don't, it's no Republic, and no Democracy either.

The discomfiture of the NeoCons and their contempt for democracy is showing both here and in the Middle East.

Far better for them a Corporate State, even when it's less efficient, as evidenced by the Reptilican idea to shift many duties of the Internal Revenue Service over to private collection agencies- even if it ends up costing the government a lot more money.

...Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers — each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes — to three collection agencies. Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller tax debts to private companies over time. Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago...

David Sirota:

...Usually, the establishment hides its hatred for democracy in vague rhetoric. But now, scared for their relevance and angry that their elitist sensibilities are being offended by ordinary voters, their loathing is all out in the open. Pundits and politicians in Washington are publicly telling American voters that we do not matter, and that they believe we should not matter...

What's Law or Democracy compared to the Divine Right of Corporate Rule?

It's for our own good, we're told.  ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Tomorrow Belongs to the United

Digby points to a greater disturbance in the force for the Sith Lords:

A federal judge's ruling that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional set off a flurry of political responses yesterday, as Republicans tried to keep control of the national security debate amid signs that their own party's ranks may be breaking under the pressure of the Iraq war.

President Bush concluded a discussion on the economy with a challenge to Democrats, many of whom had hailed U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's ruling that the NSA's wiretapping efforts violate both the Bill of Rights and federal law.

"Those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live," Bush said after meeting with his economic team at Camp David. "This country of ours is at war, and we must give those whose responsibility it is to protect the United States the tools necessary to protect this country in a time of war."

He then said that "it would be interesting to see . . . how other policymakers react."

Minutes later, under the headline "Dems Rejoice," the Republican National Committee illuminated those reactions, releasing the statements of eight Democrats -- including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the 2004 presidential nominee -- all heralding the decision as a rebuke to the president...

"There is no consensus that Republicans are better on terrorism than the Democrats, as once was clearly the case," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found "no evidence that terrorism is weighing heavily on voters -- just 2 percent cite that as the issue they most want to hear candidates discuss, far fewer than the number mentioning education, gas prices, or health care." The center continued: "And while roughly a third of Americans (35 percent) say they are very concerned that if Democrats gain control of Congress, they will weaken terrorist defenses, even more (46 percent) express great concern that Republicans will involve the U.S. in too many overseas military missions if the GOP keeps its congressional majorities."

Republicans have done such a good job framing the invasion of Iraq as part of a "war on terror" that bad news from Baghdad is casting doubts on the anti-terrorism effort...

But that doesn't change the message for the third of us in lock step... or goose step:

..."It's an opportunity, as we see it, to highlight the fundamental choice between the two parties," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said, "between a party that understands the need for post-9/11 tools in a post-9/11 world and a party that questions giving law enforcement the tools they need to be successful."

That third of us, the uber-patriots , who seem determined to lead whether we want them to or not.

Determined enough to steal multiple elections. Determined enough to let their global business partners destroy American lives and property. Determined enough to start pre-emptive wars for profit. Determined enough to use religious fervor to attempt to bring us all into a third World War.

It's going to take an equal determination to stop the zombie third of the American public from bringing about a global conflict that promises to end the very Empire they're trying to create in blood.  ¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Extending TIA to the Great White North

It's a slick way to beef up the terra'ist database:

OTTAWA (CP) - Software that will help sort millions of Canadian health records was developed by a company funded through the CIA's venture capital partner, sparking concerns about the confidentiality of patient data.

Privacy advocates are raising questions about Canadian use of the Initiate Systems indexing program given its creator's financial connection to In-Q-Tel - a private firm that helps the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency zero in on promising technology...

Initiate Systems of Chicago has sold the indexing software to Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Ontario for use in a national initiative to better manage health records.

Canada Health Infoway, a non-profit corporation accountable to the federal, provincial and territorial governments, aims to create compatible electronic health information systems across the country.

In-Q-Tel was established seven years ago as a private company to help the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community identify, acquire and use cutting-edge technologies.

Though not part of the CIA, In-Q-Tel consults with the intelligence agency on the strategic value of potential transactions.

The venture capital firm made an investment in Initiate Systems earlier this year.

The intelligence connection, first reported by U.S.-based Government Health IT magazine, prompted Canada Health Infoway staff to ask participating provinces about potential problems...

The software company adds that In-Q-Tel has no member on Initiate's board of directors, nor any decision-making power.

Despite the assurances, Darrell Evans of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association remains skeptical Initiate Systems will not see patient data.

"I simply don't believe they will never have access," he said.

"I think there's reason to be concerned about this."

Evans contends the arrangement with a U.S. firm with intelligence ties increases the vulnerability of such files in an era when security agencies are keenly interested in personal dossiers to fight terrorism.

"Governments want this information. There's no question. If they see the need for it, they will get it."

Thanks to the Project for the link.  ¶ 3:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Inflation

Major arms soar to twice pre-9/11 cost
Systems to have little direct role in terror fight
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | August 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The estimated costs for the development of major weapons systems for the US military have doubled since September 11, 2001, with a trillion-dollar price tag for new planes, ships, and missiles that would have little direct role in the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The soaring cost estimates -- disclosed in a report for the Republican-led Senate Budget Committee -- have led to concerns that supporters of multibillion-dollar weapons programs in Congress, the Pentagon , and the defense industry are using the conflicts and the war on terrorism to fulfill a wish-list of defense expenditures, whether they are needed or not for the war on terrorism.

The report, based on Defense Department data, concluded that the best way to keep defense spending in check in the coming years lies in ``controlling the cost of weaponry," especially those programs that the Pentagon might not necessarily need.

The projections of what it will cost to acquire ``major weapons programs" currently in production or on the drawing board soared from $790 billion in September 2001 to $1.61 trillion in June 2006, according to the congressional analysis of Pentagon data.

Costs for some of the most expensive new weapon systems -- such as satellite-linked combat vehicles for ground troops; a next-generation fighter plane ; and a cutting-edge, stealth-technology destroyer for the Navy -- are predicted to cost even more by the time they are delivered, because many of them are still in their early phases. In a quarterly report to Congress on weapons costs earlier this month, the Pentagon reported that of the $1.61 trillion it thinks it will need for big-ticket weapons, it has spent more than half so far -- about $909 billion.

But the huge increase in weapons costs is already placing enormous strain on the federal budget, according to government budget specialists, who predict major increases in defense spending for years to come so that the Pentagon can afford all the weapons it has on the books. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for example, estimates that between 2012 and 2024 the Pentagon budget will have to grow between 18 percent and 34 percent over what was appropriated this year...

The tail is quite a bit larger than the dog, and appears to have developed an appetite for wagging all its own.

Why we fight [a 32.7 MB .ram file, requires RealPlayer or equivalent].  ¶ 2:57 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Project for the Old American Century

Check out the whole site, but I love the video archive here.  ¶ 7:22 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Bigger the Lie, the Stronger the Belief

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie
By Ruth Rosen

...You might say, "But everyone knows it was al-Qaeda." And you'd be right, but do most Americans really know just who those terrorists were or that they had no connection to Iraq -- that not a single one of them even came from that country? It doesn't sound very important until you realize that various polls over the last five years have reported from 20% to 50% of Americans still believe Iraqis were on those planes. (They were not.) As of early 2005, according to a Harris poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein actually helped plan the attack and supported the hijackers. And in February, 2006, according to a unique Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, "85% said the U.S. mission is mainly ‘to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks'; 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was ‘to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'"

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf,was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich. The idea was simple enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) often enough and most people will come to accept it as the truth. During World War II, the predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, described how the Germans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

This is, in fact, just what the Bush administration has been doing ever since 9/11. As a result, in 2005, an ABC/Washington Post poll found that 56% of Americans still thought Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction "shortly before the war," and 60% still believed Iraq had provided "direct support" to al-Qaeda prior to the war. In June 2006, Fox News ran a story once again dramatizing the supposed links between 9/11 and Iraq. And, as recently as July, 2006, a Harris poll found that 64% of those polled "say it is true that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda."

The Bush administration's Big Lie has worked very well. Dick Cheney, the point man on this particular lie, has repeated it year after year. In a similar way, George Bush has repeatedly explained his 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, by insisting that we must fight terrorists in that country so that we don't have to fight them here. (It turned out to be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.)

Neither these, nor so many other administration statements had a shred of truth to them. Even the President, who repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the September 11th attacks, admitted on September 18, 2003 that there was no evidence the deposed Iraqi dictator had had a hand in them...

This is the tragic failure of Stone's "World Trade Center". It undercuts the historical value of the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the last five years, still believed by far too many Americans -- that in Iraq, we are fighting those who attacked our country.

The Big Lie really works well for a segment of America Goebbels would have really liked.

Says John Sugg: Two really devilish guys materialized in Toccoa, Ga., last month to harangue 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious far right who spoke at American Vision's "Worldview Super Conference 2006," Herb Titus and Gary North called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.

Titus and North aren't household names. But Titus, former dean of TV preacher Pat Robertson's Regent University law school, has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in county courthouses across the nation. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstructionism, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism.

"I don't want to capture their (mainstream Americans') system. I want to replace it," fumed North to a cheering audience. North has called for the stoning of gays and nonbelievers (rocks are cheap and plentiful, he has observed). Both friends and foes label him "Scary Gary."

...the Reconstructionists are the folks behind attacks on science and public education. They're allied with proselytizers who have tried to convert Air Force cadets -- future pilots with fingers on nuclear triggers -- into religious zealots. Like the communists of the 1930s, they exert tremendous stealth political gravity, drawing many sympathizers in their wake, and their friends now dominate the Republican Party in many states.

Titus' and North's speeches, laced with conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, were more Leninist than Christian in the tactics proposed -- as in their vision to use freedom to destroy the freedom of others. That's not surprising -- the founder of Christian Reconstruction, the late fringe Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony, railed against the "heresy" of democracy.

...Everything they need to know about the universe and the origin of man is in the first two chapters of Genesis. They know the answer before any question is asked. DeMar's spin is what he calls a clash of "worldviews." According to DeMar and his speakers, God sanctions only their worldview. And that worldview is a hash of enforcing Old Testament Mosaic law (except when it comes to chowing down on pork barbecue), rewriting American history to endorse theocracy and explaining politics by the loopy theories of the John Birch Society. (Christian Reconstructionism evolved, so to speak, from a radical variation of Calvinism, AKA Puritanism, and the Bircher politics of such men as the late Marietta, Ga., congressman, Larry McDonald.) For most of the four-day conference, DeMar turned the Bible over to others to thump. North blamed the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission for the success of secularists. Titus told of Jesus making a personal appearance in the rafters of his Oregon home.

At the heart of what was taught by a succession of speakers:

* Six-day, "young earth" creationism is the only acceptable doctrine for Christians. Even "intelligent design" or "old earth" creationism are compromises with evil secularism.
* Public education is satanic and must be destroyed.
* The First Amendment was intended to keep the federal government from imposing a national religion, but states should be free to foster a religious creed. (Several states did that during the colonial period and the nation's early days, a model the Reconstructionists want to emulate.)
* The Founding Fathers intended to protect only the liberties of the established ultra-conservative denominations of that time. Expanding the list to include "liberal" Protestant denominations, much less Catholics, Jews and (gasp!) atheists, is a corruption of the Founders' intent.

Education earned the most vitriol at the conference. Effusing that the Religious Right has captured politics and much of the media, North proclaimed: "The only thing they (secularists) have still got a grip on is the university system." Academic doctorates, he contended, are a conspiracy fomented by the Rockefeller family. All academic programs (except, he said, engineering) are now dominated by secularists and Darwinists...

They must think they need engineers to build and launch their Holy Hand Grenades.

...There are big theological differences between the Religious Right's generals and the Reconstructionists. Traditional Christian theology teaches that history will muddle along until Jesus' Second Coming. That teaching is tough to turn into a political movement. Reconstructionists preach that the nation and the world must come under Christian "dominion" (as they define it) before Christ's return -- a wonderful theology to promote global conquest.

In short, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation's largest Protestant denomination) may not agree with everything the Reconstructionists advocate, but they sure don't seem to mind hanging out with this openly theocratic, anti-democratic crowd...

No wonder Dear Leader cultivates the biggest lie of all.  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  More than a President

Greenwald discusses some of the rationale as the grand struggle for the Ring of Power continues:

The most under-appreciated influence on the Bush presidency is almost certainly Michael Gerson, the evangelical Christian who served as Bush's chief speechwriter from the beginning of Bush's presidency until recently, when he resigned… and he is a close confidant of the President.

He has a new essay in Newsweek purporting to describe how the 9/11 attacks "changed George W. Bush." Most of it is nothing more than the now-cliched neoconservative claptrap…

…it is somewhat baffling that those who seek to defend the President do so by claiming that battling terrorism is dependent upon reducing the level of chaos and hatred in the Middle East -- even though the region has more chaos, violence, and anti-American resentment than at any time in recent history… We achieve Middle East peace with war, stability with chaos, pro-American alliances with elections of intensely anti-U.S. regimes….

What is most notable about Gerson's essay is that it certainly seems as though he believes a military confrontation with Iran is both necessary and imminent:

"First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn't care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, "Life is not fair."

"Behind all the chaos and death in Lebanon and northern Israel, Iran is the main cause of worry in the West Wing—the crisis with the highest stakes. Its government shows every sign of grand regional ambitions, pulling together an anti-American alliance composed of Syria, terrorist groups like Hizbullah and Hamas, and proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. And despite other disagreements, all the factions in Iran—conservative, ultraconservative and "let's usher in the apocalypse" fanatics—seem united in a nuclear nationalism.

"Some commentators say that America is too exhausted to confront this threat. But presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments; they are made by the determination of national interests. And the low blood-sugar level of pundits counts not at all. Here the choice is not easy, but it is simple: can America (and other nations) accept a nuclear Iran? . . .

"There are still many steps of diplomacy, engagement and sanctions between today and a decision about military conflict with Iran—and there may yet be a peaceful solution. But in this diplomatic dance, America should not mirror the infinite patience of Europe. There must be someone in the world capable of drawing a line—someone who says, "This much and no further." At some point, those who decide on aggression must pay a price, or aggression will be universal. If American "cowboy diplomacy" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."

…
(1) It has been obvious for some time that the President's most bloodthirsty supporters are pushing for war with Iran, and the disappointment and humiliation they feel in the face of a collapsing Iraq and a failed Lebanon invasion has intensified that need -- hence, all the talk about how "Iran won" the war in Lebanon…

(2) The unbridled disdain for the democratic process is palpable in Gerson's sermon. ..

The 9/11 attacks justify all of this because it made the President something more than a President; it made him a Great Cause. ..

Gerson's claim that "presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments" would come as a great surprise to the Founders, who expressly required a Declaration of War from Congress precisely because they believed the nation should fight wars only if the American people decide to take that risk…

(3)… the administration's theory of executive power almost certainly means that they believe they have the right to initiate a war on Iran even without any declaration of war or any other form of Congressional approval. Indeed, they would be empowered to do so even in the face of Congressional opposition. ..

This administration would have a very hard time convincing a majority of Americans -- and a majority of a war-weary and frightened Congress -- to explicitly authorize military force against Iran... Would that be an impediment to finding a way to provoke a military confrontation?

That's just what we've seen in Lebanon, although this conflict seems to be deflating.

Doubtless the recent resignation of Gerson has helped take the edge off of the Dominionist faction in the Oval Office. But the long knives among the Presidential advisors are coming out: Kristol second guessing Rumsfeld is a good example. The recent smokescreen attempt to portrary the President as an idiot also has propaganda value in plausible deniability.

But Dear Leader not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shiite before the Iraqi invasion? That's unbelievable disinformation, especially given the long and lucrative financial dealings he and his family have had with the Arab world. And continue to have. That's unbelievable disinformation, given the close involvement many members of his administration and family had with the Iranian government.

It's the Sergeant Schultz defense designed to appeal to a popular meme, and you shouldn't believe it for a moment.  ¶ 10:26 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Only Idiots Want This War

Professor Juan Cole notices:

…Since the United Nations resolution calling for a halt to hostilities, Prime Minister Olmert, President Bush, Secretary-General Nasrallah, President al-Asad and President Ahmadinejad have all been procliaming the war a personal victory.

I don't know why they would want to claim it.

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers… It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it. But what could he have saved or made from this transaction? A few thousand dollars? It was stupid for him to risk the public perception of impropriety for such a small sum. Unprofessional.

…this war was a keystone cops war. It was horribly destructive for Lebanon, but not to any purpose for anyone, including the Israelis. The Americans and Israelis seem to have thought that the small farmers and small shopkeepers of south Lebanon were a sinister wraith army of the ghost of Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, they were . . . small farmers and shopkeepers. One of the reasons they are rushing back down south is to see to their small farms, even if the small farmhouse isn't there any more.

But there you have it. Everyone wants credit for this cornucopia of foolishness.

Bush came out and said that Hizbullah had been defeated, and tried to link Hizbullah to the Sunni Arab guerrillas who make his life hell in Iraq. But, George, Hizbullah is Shiite. It was your Shiite allies in Iraq who supported it. Bush underscored his permanent deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness when at a press conference he said this:

…"The first step is -- and part of the mandate in the U.N. resolution was to secure Syria's borders. Iran is able to ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria.

Secondly is to deal -- is to help seal off the ports around Lebanon.

… In other words, part of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will be to seal off the Syrian border."

…I can't even understand what he means by "the ports around Lebanon" being sealed. Does he mean Lebanon's ports? Note that you wouldn't want to seal off Lebanon's ports, since Lebanon will need to import things through them. That you could have such good port security in Lebanon that you could altogether screen out missile shipments is unlikely. Does he mean that Turkish, Syrian, and Israeli ports around Lebanon should be sealed. Just Syrian? Impractical.

Note also that the little blue strip at the bottom of Lebanon is generally where the UN peacekeeping troops will be. They aren't in a position to "seal off" the Syrian border, which stretches far to their northeast, and can't be "sealed off" by anyone at all, being rugged and long. The blue helmets of the UN, being a land force, are not in a position to seal off Lebanon's ports, such as Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Jounieh or Tripoli. Nor could they seal off the Syrian port of Latakiya, if that is what Bush meant.

In other words, Bush doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about and nothing he said on this subject makes any sense at all. Why does the US press always let him get away with this?

Possibly because they're idiots who can't read a map, too?

Like Saint Ronnie before him, the dementia of the old dry drunk in office serves as the perfectly plausible deniability for his handlers. His arrogance and belligerance make it seem unlikely he could be taking orders from anyone else. But with Darth Rumsfeld and the Cheneyburton Corporation, and their host of sychophants, increasingly at odds over exactly who's in control of the Ring of Power, the gaps in Dear Leader's behavior become increasingly noticable.  ¶ 12:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Company Board Dispute

A Self-Defeating War
by George Soros

The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence.

Unfortunately, the "war on terror" metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense.

What makes the war on terror self-defeating?

* First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.
* Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush's global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.
* Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.
* Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between "us" and "them." We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world.

Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation.

With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes. This is the test that confronts us.

George Soros is absolutely right. And a very close business partner of the Bush family. His rivals.

Thus the world's largest private equity firm is positioned to have a controlling interest in whomever wins in 2006- or 2008. Indeed, the Empire is in reality not America owned, only America based.  ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Complete 9/11 Timeline Revisited

In a much more organized format than the first time I cited it.

If you're not familiar with it you need to be aware of it.

Oh yeah. This too.  ¶ 7:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "The Nexus of Politics and Terror"

Watch it all. Fifteen minutes of your time well spent.  ¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Out of This World Hot Property

NASA can't find original tape of moon landing

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong's famous "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," a NASA spokesman said on Monday.

Armstrong's famous space walk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaloma said.

"We haven't seen them for quite a while. We've been looking for over a year and they haven't turned up," Hautaloma said.

The tapes also contain data about the health of the astronauts and the condition of the spacecraft. In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing, he said.

"I wouldn't say we're worried -- we've got all the data. Everything on the tapes we have in one form or another," Hautaloma said.

NASA has retained copies of the television broadcasts and offers several clips on its Web site.

But those images are of lower quality than the originals stored on the missing magnetic tapes...

700 boxes! Those tapes are valuable. Some private contractor probably pulled up a trailer one night when his security boys were on guard, told 'em to fill it up, and pulled off into the night.

Did I ever mention that Michael Griffin was an ex CSC/ DynCorp CEO?  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  An Uneasy Triumvirate: Who Holds the Ring of Power?

Among other items of interest, Juan Cole says:

...Any US attack on Iran could well lead to the US and British troops in Iraq being cut off from fuel and massacred by enraged Shiites. Shiite irregulars could easily engage in pipeline and fuel convoy sabotage of the sort deployed by the Sunni guerrillas in the north. Without fuel, US troops would be sitting ducks for rocket and mortar attacks that US air power could not hope completely to stop (as the experience of Israel with Hizbullah in Lebanon demonstrates). A pan-Islamic alliance of furious Shiites and Sunni guerrillas might well be the result, spelling the decisive end of Americastan in Iraq. Shiite Iraqis are already at the boiling point over Israel's assault on their coreligionists in Lebanon. An attack on Iran could well push them over the edge. People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.

By the way, Hersh maintains that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has at least some inkling of all this, which is one reason he hasn't been enthusiastically cheering on the Lebanon war.

I had this second hand, from someone who knows someone in the know. It confirms Hersh's account:


' Rumsfeld is very uneasy with the unquestioning support for the Israeli offensive because of the impact it will have on American troops in Iraq. His point to Bush and Rice is that Iraq's Shias will not stand by while their Lebanese Shia brothers are destroyed. He has pointed out to them -- to Rice and Bush -- that there are close family and political ties between the Moqtada al-Sadr family and the Musa al-Sadr and the close friendship between Maliki and Nawaf Moussawi, the foreign minister of Hezbollah. That Hezbollah worked to free the Dawa 17 at one point in its history was a surprise to Rice, as well as to Bush. With American casualties mounting in Iraq Rumsfeld does not believe we need to make enemies of the Shia. The demonstration of last week shook him -- and American commanders. '



If Hersh and my correspondent are correct, we are beginning to see an "India Office" effect in the US government. When Britain ruled India, the British Government of India often developed its own foreign policy and priorities that were not the same as London's Foreign Office. Rumsfeld does have Iraq interests for which he has to speak, however much he hates Hizbullah and Iran.

The strategeric analogy with Kosovo is unsettling. That was a dust-up NATO more-or-less won, but the guys in charge were Democrats. It's an uneasy analogy, though, since that was a conflict where the neo liberals- and DynCorp private security cut their teeth. It was also where DynCorp got their fame in human trafficking. Dr. Cole goes on to say:

As for the Israelis, the Kosovo analogy is plausible, since Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instanced Kosovo as justification for his actions. The irony is that the Israelis misunderstood Kosovo. Hizbullah is like the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), not like Milosevic's Serbs. If Wesley Clarke had bombed the KLA, the Kosovo war would have failed completely. More ironically, in its decision to expel the Shiite population from the area of Lebanon south of the Litani river, and to make nearly 1 million Lebanese homeless, the Israelis acted more like Milosevic himself than like NATO...

The perception of reality by Darth Rumsfeld is to be encouraged, if only to keep us all out of World War III. Rumsfeld likes slow simmering wars where men of low profile can make lots of dirty money. Cheney likes the money too, but the siren song of colonialism and all that oil in the ground and all those nukes we've got stockpiled makes him yearn for a Final Solution for those difficult people.

Dear Leader just thinks what Dick sez, and loves his pretty Precious.

But the ceasefire went through. Darth Rumsfeld may have won this round. One wonders if Shotgun Dick will let the balance stand, with the power of the moustache of Sauron himself humilated before the whole U.N.?  ¶ 12:26 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Darth Rumsfeld detects a disturbance in the Force

...but Big Time Dick and Dear Leader go on spinning their new realities anyway.

Seymour M. Hersch:

...Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.

Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”

A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation...”

It turns out the Sith Lord isn't the only one uneasy about the timeline he seems to be on. In Israel:

Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel’s faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon.

Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.

Olmert, who like Bush lacks direct wartime experience, agreed that a dose of military force against Hezbollah might damage the guerrilla group’s influence in Lebanon and intimidate its allies, Iran and Syria, countries that Bush has identified as the chief obstacles to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

As part of Bush’s determination to create a “new Middle East” – one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires – Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.

One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush’s attack-Syria idea was “nuts” since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression...

So perhaps a few of the voices in the PentagramPentagon and the IDF have a preoccupation with winning instead of the Great Global Cultural Armageddon the Dominionists have planned for us.

Maybe some of the Company are beginning to wonder just how messy this World War III (or IV, or whatever Bill Kristol's buddies are calling this) thing will get. A slow simmering burn of hot coals is good for the Company. But increasingly Dear Leader's preoccupied with pouring gasoline on the flame.

No way to make money on that.  ¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Strategeric Advice on the Demo War

If it has a few scratches, do they still charge full retail?

Lambert points to Hersch's expose that the lead up to the Lebanese conflict was coached by those wild Dominionist flyboys in the U.S. Air Force:

...The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground...

The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran...”

...The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.

One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past...”

Islamic fundamentalists fighting inexperienced Israeli zealots, taking advice from Dominionist faithful.

A cakewalk, surely. After all, God is on *our* side. But whom God would destroy...  ¶ 5:07 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Premature Incarceration

Via Tinfoil Hat Boy

LONDON - NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports...

British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody "in circumstances where there was due process," according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British...

The Great Strategerizer apparently also decided they didn't need all that high falutin' technowlergy about the same time they were bustin' up the Brits' bust.

After all, if they had let the Brits find out too much, or if they checked things too carefully, it might interfere with the planned October surprise.  ¶ 4:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Kool Aid in the Canteen

Billmon: A Different Kind of Cluelessness

Marine officer Brian Humphreys looks at his experience trying to win hearts and minds in Iraq and wonders what Hizbullah has got that the few and the proud don't got:

"Whatever the objective truth of Hezbollah's motives, its many supporters in southern Lebanon believe fervently that it is their organization, not an Iranian surrogate. Few if any American units in Iraq have achieved anything close to this level of success in winning the support of the local population . . . Hezbollah's success among civilians in Lebanon, which is only reinforced by a ruthless pummeling from a reviled enemy, contrasts sharply with the continued fragility of the much more modest U.S. gains in Iraq, achieved at a much higher price.

The lessons should be clear. To engage in insurgency or counterinsurgency -- fancy terms for grass-roots politics by other means -- one must be willing and, most of all, able to work in the underbelly of local politics, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. . . one has to ask why Hezbollah has been able to pull it off in Lebanon, while young Americans continue to endure a host of nasty surprises in Iraq."

Washington Post
Learning from Hezbollah
August 12, 2006

I dunno. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that Hizbullah in Lebanon is an authentic grassroots political movement composed of local Shiites, while the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq is an occuping army of foreign infidels. Could that be it?

I probably shouldn't be so harsh on officer Humphreys. He at least understands what has gone so disastrously wrong in Iraq. But the fact that even he can't figure out why Hizbullah has been able to achieve what the military might and financial majesty of the United States government could not is a pretty sad commentary on the fog of delusion that constitutes how Americans tend to see themselves and their place in the world...  ¶ 8:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Hot Times for American Veterans

Is an Armament Sickening U.S. Soldiers?
by Deborah Hastings

It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills — morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves...

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick...

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said, 'It's all in your head.' "

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.

But the medic knew something the others didn't.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins...

...they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.

___

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."

The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said...

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous — not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation...

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities "found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities," the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops...

That ought to be sometime before the next half-life in about 100,000 years.

Darth Rumsfeld is an equal opportunity war crime perpetrator.

He's indifferent to his own troops as much as he is to the other side.  ¶ 8:17 AM 1 comments links to this post

  What's Good for Business Gives Us the Business

For the subcontractors of the Company, business is very good indeed:

While the Bush Administration calls for the immediate disbanding of what it has labeled "private" and "illegal" militias in Lebanon and Iraq, it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its own global private mercenary army tasked with protecting US officials and institutions overseas. The secretive program, which spans at least twenty-seven countries, has been an incredible jackpot for one heavily Republican-connected firm in particular: Blackwater USA. Government records recently obtained by The Nation reveal that the Bush Administration has paid Blackwater more than $320 million since June 2004 to provide "diplomatic security" services globally...

Blackwater's highly lucrative "diplomatic security" contract was officially awarded under the State Department's little-known Worldwide Personal Protective Service (WPPS) program, described in State Department documents as a government initiative to protect US officials as well as "certain foreign government high level officials whenever the need arises."

A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of Blackwater's WPPS contract proposal, obtained by The Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." The audit also found that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies...

According to the most recent Government Accountability Office report, some 48,000 private soldiers, working for 181 private military firms, are deployed in Iraq alone. Blackwater, now one of the most prominent and successful companies providing soldiers in Iraq, was relatively unknown until March 31, 2004, when four of its contractors were ambushed and killed in Falluja [see Scahill, "Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater," May 8]. In the days and weeks that followed, company executives hired ultra-connected lobbyists and were welcomed by powerful government officials as heroes, allowing the firm to solidify its role in the Bush Administration's foreign policy apparatus...

It's the Praetorian Guard, helping with policy details for Secretary Supertanker and her Dear Leader, who might miss his vacation otherwise. Blackwater runs State, and CSC/ DynCorp runs Star Wars. It's so much easier when you let the help do your thinking and fighting for you.  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

  מיסיון אקומפלישעד, מיסיון אכומפלישעד

Billmon calls the play:

Kabuki Offensive

This is like a scene from a bar fight, where one of the pugilists first makes sure his friends have a good strong hold of him, and then starts yelling "Let me at him!"

'Ehud Olmert's office said late Friday that the expanded incursion into Lebanon would continue "for the time being," despite agreeing to a cease-fire resolution drafted by the United Nations Security Council.

Senior Israel Defense Forces officers said that the IDF is "continuing forward at full power. . . " '

This, of course, is 100% kosher bullshit -- nobody in their right mind would start a major offensive at "full power" knowing full well it will all have to be shut down within 48 or at most 72 hours. So it looks like the big push was just a big fraud all along -- a desperate attempt by Olmert and his bedraggled colleagues to try to kick a little dust in the eyes of their domestic constituents. But the message -- "Yeah, boy, if they had'na stopped me I would have kicked Hizbullah's ass but good" -- isn't very original or at this point even slightly believable.

What else are they going to do? They've blown it, right down the line, from the opening bid for an aerial knockout, through the defeats and retreats, the incredible shrinking war aims, and the daily humiliation of seeing a third of Israel bombarded with rockets. And now this -- a ceasefire that appears to give Hizbullah all or nearly all of what it demanded (although not the Laker tickets), supervised by a "reinforced" version of UNIFIL (most of the reinforcements will probably never arrive) working under a limited one-year mandate...

And for this, Lebanon was ravaged, thousands were killed, millions of civilians on both sides spent weeks couped up in air raid shelters, and the credibility and any lingering shreds of respectability the U.S. government had in the Islamic world were flushed straight down the you-know-what.

All for this:

'Why did we embark on the war, if not to ensure that French soldiers will protect Israel from the Hezbollah rocket battery.'

The long knives are out -- for Olmert, for Peretz (the ward boss and ex-"peace" activist turned defense minister) for Halutz and the commander of the Northern Front (who was effectively sacked in the middle of the war) and for that matter probably half of entire IDF general staff -- if they don't sink daggers into each other's backs first. Losing is never pretty, and the post-war settling of accounts after this loss is going to be even less so.

Already it seems as if every minor league neocon in Washington is taking the opportunity to remind Israel that if there's one thing Americans detest it's a loser. So much for all that tearful singing of the Ha'tikvah. If Washington's Middle Eastern Rottweiler wants to keep getting its kennel ration, it's going to have to put a little more teeth into its work next time.

At this point I'm not sure if the Israeli branch of the punditburo has yet to recognize the full magnitude of the debacle, or whether it's just trying to put a brave face on it. But this statement, from Ha'aretz's Ze'ev Schiff, is a leading nominee for the Emperor Hirohito Memorial Prize for Ridiculous Understatement:

"In regard to other Arab elements, it is very possible that Israeli deterrence will be somewhat undercut."

All the bellicose rhetoric in the world -- like Schiff's threat that Israel will respond with "cruel craziness" if other red lines are crossed in the future -- can't conceal the multiple failures: of a miltary aristocracy's arrogant faith in technology, of an Army that's grown accustomed to waging war against Palestinian teenagers, of a political establishment that believes with zombie-like intensity that the cure for its own incompetence is ever greater applications of military force. (Because, of course, that's the only thing the Arabs understand.)

There will be hell to pay for this fiasco -- coming as it did on top of Uncle Sam's own murder suicide pact in Iraq. When and where that payment wil be demanded isn't clear yet, but if the past is any guide it will be paid in the blood of the innocent, not the guilty...

As always, you should read it all to get the full flavor.  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Riders on the Storm

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm...
-The Doors


CHICAGO -- When gunmen broke into Nabil Toma Shabo's Baghdad home a year ago and threatened to kill his family, he says he decided to flee Iraq. He had no idea how long the search for safety would last -- or where it would take him.

The seven-month trek began in Istanbul, where Mr. Shabo, traveling with his family, found a smuggler who promised to get them to Mexico and then the U.S. for $10,000 -- their life savings. After four months in Mexico, the Shabos were driven to the border. The driver pointed to a fence and told the family to start walking.

"He said, 'There it is, there is America,' " Mr. Shabo remembers. The Shabos walked to a U.S. guard post and, in halting English, requested political asylum. While they wait for a ruling, they are living in a Chicago suburb with Mr. Shabo's parents, who fled to the U.S. with an earlier migratory wave during the regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Amid sectarian violence in Iraq, senior U.S. military commanders warned lawmakers last week that the country is at risk of sliding into civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are becoming refugees, with thousands of them trying to reach the U.S. But with visas difficult to come by, a growing number -- including the Shabo family -- are entering illegally and then seeking asylum, sparking questions about how much Washington should assist those fleeing a U.S.-led war.

The Iraqi exiles entering America are part of one of the largest exoduses in modern Middle Eastern history. The Iraqi government has over the past 12 months issued more than 1.8 million new passports, a figure that corresponds with nearly 10% of the country's population. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are more than 800,000 Iraqi exiles in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Some U.S. border officials express general concern that Iraqi insurgents might try to enter the U.S., though they say there is no evidence any have...

No evidence, of course. And perfect cover. Like Don John Negroponte needed an excuse.

...Theres a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah...
-The Doors  ¶ 7:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  ...and it stays on your Permanent Record

Buried underneath the Terra headlines this week:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — A federal commission approved a final report on Thursday that urges a broad shake-up of American higher education. It calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid...

...the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents 900 private institutions including liberal arts colleges, major research universities and church- and other faith-related colleges, attacked the recommendation to develop a national database to follow individual students’ progress as a way of holding colleges accountable for students’ success...

Not to mention the former students themselves. Imagine that, a government database the Company can access to follow the progress of an employee or a prospective employee.

...The association called the proposal a dangerous intrusion on privacy, saying, “Our members find this idea chilling.”

But count on it, there are right-thinking folks who think this is a very cool idea indeed.  ¶ 11:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Dead Zones

In the Pacific:

Ocean scientists took their first look Tuesday into the oxygen-starved "dead zone" spreading off the Oregon Coast and were shocked by what they saw: a lifeless wasteland of thousands of dead crabs, starfish and no live fish at all.

"It was a real eye-opener for all of us," said Hal Weeks, a marine ecologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "I don't think anybody expected this sort of thing."

Dead Dungeness crabs off Cape Perpetua, just south of Yachats, "were like jellybeans in a jar. You just can't count them, there were so many."

Oxygen levels in places along the central Oregon Coast have sunk to the lowest levels ever recorded on the West Coast of the United States, said Francis Chan, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University and the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, an alliance of research institutions.

Scientists suspect swings in the Earth's climate tied to global warming may be shifting wind conditions to bring about such grim results.

Seawater turns deadly for marine life when concentrations of the dissolved oxygen they breathe fall below about 1.4 milliliters per liter. On Monday, Chan measured a concentration of .05, or almost 30 times below the lethal level, about 90 feet below the surface.

It is very close to a complete absence of oxygen, a situation rarely known in the world's oceans, said Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State. New bacteria that take over when oxygen disappears are known to release poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas.

"We never suspected that could happen here," Lubchenco said.

This is the fifth consecutive summer that a layer of low-oxygen water has blanketed the ocean floor along the Oregon Coast, and it has rapidly turned into the most severe episode so far. The layer this year is thicker, lower in oxygen and far larger, covering at least four times more area than in previous years, Lubchenco said...

In the Gulf of Mexico:

Scientific investigations in the Gulf of Mexico have documented a large area of the Louisiana continental shelf with seasonally-depleted oxygen levels (< 2mg/l). Most aquatic species cannot survive at such low oxygen levels. The oxygen depletion, referred to as hypoxia, begins in late spring, reaches a maximum in midsummer, and disappears in the fall. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the spatial extent of this zone more than doubled in size, to over 18,000 km2, and has remained about that size each year through midsummer 1997...

Nutrient over-enrichment from anthropogenic sources is one of the major stresses impacting coastal ecosystems. Generally, excess nutrients lead to increased algal production and increased availability of organic carbon within an ecosystem, a process known as eutrophication. There are multiple sources of excessive nutrients in watersheds, both point and non-point, and the transport and delivery of these nutrients is a complex process which is controlled by a range of factors. These include not only the chemistry, but also the ecology, hydrology, and geomorphology of the various portions of a watershed and that of the receiving system. Both the near-coastal hydrodynamics that generate water column stratification and the nutrients that fuel primary productivity contribute to the formation of hypoxic zones. Human activities on land can add excess nutrients to coastal areas or compromise the ability of ecosystems to remove nutrients either from the landscape or from the waterways themselves...

The last time the NOAA was funded to make a throrough update of these man-made oceanic deserts?

November 1, 2000

It seems there have been fat daddies to protect issues of over-riding importance since November 2, 2000, that didn't match the significance of a dying sea...  ¶ 10:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Protection Racket

WATERBURY, Conn. - Sen. Joe Lieberman set out on his go-it-alone re-election campaign Thursday and seized on the terror arrests in Britain to argue that his Democratic opponent, Ned Lamont, does not fully understand the danger facing the nation.

That didn't take long.

Shortly after the shock:

Washington insiders from both parties have long been muttering that George W Bush's Republican party is going to lose ground in elections in November.

The only question, they say, is how much ground. Enough to lose control of one or both houses of Congress?

They may have had the beginnings of an answer on Tuesday night, but the scalp that was claimed was not Republican - it was Democrat Joe Lieberman...

Came the awe:

Act I, that sits in print form in front of me on the front page but has been quickly buried in The New York Pravda website:

...Republicans began a concerted effort to use Mr. Lieberman’s defeat to portray Democrats as weak on national defense, reprising a theme that they made central to the last two national campaigns.

The attacks came in searing remarks from, among others, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage “al Qaeda types.”

“It’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy,’’ Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview with news service reporters...

But who needs encouraging? From the BBC:

Twenty-four people are being held in London after night-time raids. One raid was in Walthamstow, east London.

Searches are under way at a number of businesses and homes after an "unprecedented" level of surveillance.

Two of those arrested under the Terrorism Act came from the Birmingham area, West Midlands police have said...

Noteworthy is that this plan was uncovered by Her Majesty's Secret Service and not Negroponte's, although the Homeland Security folks are spurting a rainbow of alert colors right about now. [Update: Big Brother was apparently listening in and more than ready to take all credit for alerting the British, but Her Majesty's MI5 begs to differ.]

[Update to the Update: Looks like Bu$hCo has tripped over its own feet giving credit to the Brits while the NSA claims it for itself. And wouldn't you know it, CNN gives airtime to the idea Lamont is the Al-Qaeda candidate.]

Still, one gets the impression the timing was awfully good.

...Imagine a conversation late Tuesday night between Bush and his British Prime Minister lapdog, just as Ned Lamont declares victory. "Yo, Blair," Bush says while scarfing down a dinner role. "I gotta to do something about this sh*t. Can you finally arrest those suspected terrorists you told me about? This election business is ruining my vacation! I know you're chillin' in the Caribbean yourself right now, but it sure would be great if you could make a few calls for me ASAP."

Don't buy it? Consider this quote from a Reuters article on the story: "President George W. Bush had known about the investigation for several days, was briefed about it regularly and knew the arrests were coming, a senior administration official said." Both countries are surely monitoring several terrorist leads that could lead to arrests at any time. The British group would have been stopped eventually, but there has been absolutely no indication why it had to be today.

Just yesterday Tony Snow and Dick Cheney told America that Lieberman's loss was going to make us less safe and warned of the dangers of our supposedly weakened resolve against terrorism. What better way to drive the point home than to catch some terrorists in England immediately afterwards? Based on a quote from the U.K. Guardian, the Brits seem to have the same agenda: "The events unfolded just hours after (English Home Secretary John Reid) used a speech to a thinktank to accuse critics of the government's anti-terrorism measures of putting national security at risk through their failure to recognize the serious nature of the threat facing Britain."

If the timing of the media announcement wasn't a political ploy, the rhetoric and propaganda sure are. "It was in some respects suggestive of an al-Qaeda plot," Homeland Security Director Chertoff said. Attorney General Gonzales also noted it was "suggestive of al-Qaeda tactics," and FBI director Robert Mueller claimed "this had the earmarks [sic] of an al-Qaeda plot." They still warned that it was too early to reach any conclusions, yet had no problems with dropping the name of the feared organization to implant the connection in our heads without proof. If they don't know, they shouldn't even make the suggestion. The Bush Administration has become masterful at scaring the bejesus out of us without actually saying anything factual. They did exactly the same thing when they were trying to connect Saddam to terrorists. The lengthy press conference today had an awful lot of "we believe" and not very much "we know."

For his part, Bush personally declared that "it is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America" because "this nation is at war with Islamic fascists..."

Among others.

[Update: and of course, being the Omnipotence He is, Dear Leader seems more than willing to acknowledge knowing about this weeks ago].

Don't get me wrong, unlike some, I think there are real terrorists who will jump at any opportunity to kill any American. There are people who hate the American way of life. There are people who despise freedom and liberty and the Constitution.

Caliphate and Empire are two sides of the same coin.  ¶ 8:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Let's You and Him Fight"

Israel has begun to notice something peculiar about its Big Brother in the West:

...The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of "defense intellectuals" - centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others - were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to "old Likud" politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization."

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon "creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

Afghanistan is yet to be secured, Iraq is an exporter of instability and perhaps terror, too, Iranian hard-liners have been strengthened and encouraged, while the public throughout the region is ever-more radicalized, and in the yet-to-be "transformed" regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is certainly more hostile to Israel and America than its leaders. Neither listening nor talking to important, if problematic, actors in the region has only impoverished policy-making capacity.

Israel does have enemies, interests and security imperatives, but there is no logic in the country volunteering itself for the frontline of an ideologically misguided and avoidable war of civilizations.

So what should be done, on both sides of the ocean?

It is admittedly difficult for Israel to have a regional strategy that is out-of-step with the U.S. administration-of-the-day. However, the neocon approach is not unchallenged, and Israel should not be providing its ticket back to the ascendancy. A U.S. return to proactive diplomacy, realism and multilateralism, with sustained and hard engagement that delivers concrete progress, would best serve its own, Israeli and regional interests. Israel should encourage this. Israel may even have to lead, for instance, in rethinking policy on Hamas or Syria, and should certainly work intensely with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in encouraging his efforts to reach a Palestinian national understanding as a basis for stable governance, security quiet and future peace negotiations. A policy that comes with a Jerusalem kosher stamp of approval might be viewed as less of an abomination in Washington.

Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest "pro-Israel" lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances... [Thanks to Truthout for the link.]

Of course, disengagement is a wee bit difficult when even The New York Pravda prints pieces that tell Big Brother that:

Left or Right, Israelis Are Pro-War
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 9, 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 8 — As Israel’s war with Hezbollah finishes a fourth difficult week, domestic criticism of its prosecution is growing. Yet there is a paradoxical effect as well: the harder the war has been, the more the public wants it to proceed.

The criticism is not that the war is going on, but that it is going poorly. The public wants the army to hit Hezbollah harder, so it will not threaten Israel again.

And while Israelis are upset with how Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has run the war, they seem to agree with what he told aides this week — that given the weaponry and competence of Hezbollah and the damage already done to Israel, “I thank God the confrontation came now, because with every year their arsenal would have grown.”

Abroad, Israel is criticized for having overreacted and for causing disproportionate damage to Lebanon and its civilian population and even for indiscriminate bombing. But within Israel, the sense is nearly universal that unlike its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, this war is a matter of survival, not choice, and its legitimacy is unquestioned.

Even the bulk of the Israeli left feels that way. There is no real peace camp in Israel right now, says Yariv Oppenheimer, the secretary general of Peace Now, which has pressed hard for a deal with the Palestinians and on June 22, before this Lebanon war, called for a halt to air raids over the Gaza Strip. “We’re a left-wing Zionist movement, and we believe that Israel has the legitimate right to defend itself,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “We’re not pacifists. Unlike in Gaza or the West Bank, Israel isn’t occupying Lebanese territory or trying to control the lives of Lebanese. The only occupier there is Hezbollah, and Israel is trying to defend itself.”

In the daily newspaper Haaretz, a cartoon satirized the group, showing a Peace Now advocate, balding with a ponytail, in a coffee shop saying, “It won’t end until we wipe Beirut off the map...”

That reminds me of an ex-DINOcrat named Lieberman.

Funny thing is, there are Israelis against this war because the way it's being fought is stupidly wrong.

Just pick up a copy of Haaretz, or follow the link at the top here to their website. Israelis realize this war is saturated with doublethink. It has the "shoot first ask questions later" of the all-hat-and-no-cattle chickenhawks.

When you have to fight people who want to kill you, you want to be sure they're the ones you're really fighting, and when the same border villages have to be re-taken on a daily basis, it's soon apparent someone's definition of "won" and "mission accomplished" doesn't really involve winning.  ¶ 9:45 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Sunny Weather

Judd at Think Progress catches some more of that main$tream media analytical thinking:

National Review editor James S. Robbins shares his thoughts today:

"...Personally, I don’t know what all the shouting is about. Global warming is great. Granted, maybe it isn’t really happening, and if it is there are strong reasons to doubt that humans have anything to do with it. But if the world is warming, I say 'bravo.' "

What are the benefits? According to Robbins, “vast regions” of Canada would become “comfortably habitable,” “more land will be available for cultivation,” and there will be a “land boom up the coastlines as people rushed on up for beachfront property.”



It's all good!

I'm sure the citizens of the great state of Canada won't mind Mr. Robbins' new development plans, either.  ¶ 7:23 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Blood on the Sand

Even worse, from the Company viewpoint:

NAIROBI (AFP) - An oil spill caused by Israeli raids on a Lebanese power plant could rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that despoiled the Alaskan coast if not urgently addressed, the United Nations has said.

The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Tuesday the spill that poses severe ecological and human threats is already comparable to a 1999 oil tanker accident off the coast of France and had the potential to get far worse.

"In the worst-case scenario and if all the oil contained in the bombed power plant at Jiyyeh leaked into the Mediterranean Sea, the Lebanese oil spill could well rival the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989," it said in a statement...

UNEP said 12,000 tonnes of leaking oil from the Jiyyeh plant, which was bombed by
Israel on July 14 and July 15 a few days into its offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, had already polluted more than 140 kilometers (87 miles) of the Lebanese coast and spread north into Syrian waters.

The Exxon Valdez spilled 37,000 tonnes of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound after running aground on a reef on March 24, 1989, causing massive damage from which some scientists argue the area has yet to completely recover...

UNEP said two environmental experts had arrived in
Syria to begin assessing the impact of the Jiyyeh spill, which it said it feared had already affected marine life, particularly tuna and turtles, in the Mediterrean.

"This oil slick definitely poses a threat to biodiversity," said Ezio Amato, one of the two UNEP consultants.

Earlier Tuesday in Rome, an Italian environmental agency which monitors the Mediterranean said the spill posed a heightened risk of cancer.

The leakage "is a high-risk toxic cocktail made up of substances which cause cancer and damage to the endocrine system," Simonetta Lombardo of Info-Rac told reporters.

"It is not oil that has flowed but fuel for power statioms," she said. "This contains substances such as benzene, categorised as a Class 1 carcinogen..."

The old adage about pissing in your drinking water comes to mind, especially given this map:


Between that, and the depleted uranium munitions the Israeli government bought but denies using, they'd better have a good national health care system, because if they survive the American neocons and the Kadima-Likudnik madness, they're going to need it.  ¶ 10:09 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Fixer

Robert Dreyfuss:

Amid the highly charged political infighting in Washington over what to do in Iraq, you might be excused for not noticing that a bipartisan commission quietly started work last spring with a mandate to help the Bush administration rethink its policy toward the war... what makes this particular commission hard to dismiss is that it is led by perhaps the one man who might be able to break through the tight phalanx of senior officials who advise the president and filter his information. That person is the former secretary of state, Republican insider, and consigliere of the Bush family, James A. Baker III.

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in--or, perhaps, to get the hell out of--Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008...

The specter of peace breaking out everywhere has got to be chilling to the Company indeed.

It's hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. The 60 people involved in the effort have been instructed, in the strongest of terms, not to comment to reporters on the task force's work...

Baker's commission--officially called the Iraq Study Group--was created in March by Congress at the instigation of Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican. After his third trip to Iraq last year, Wolf started contacting members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, urging the creation of a high-powered, private task force to take a fresh look at the mess in Iraq. "If you had a very serious illness...and you weren't completely comfortable that everything was going the way you hoped, you'd certainly want to get a second opinion," Wolf told me. At least 30 members of Congress supported the idea, including Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). According to participants in the task force, a key silent partner with Wolf in putting it together was his Virginia Republican colleague, Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services committee.

Wolf's motivation in creating the Iraq Study Group seems to be genuine concern that the war isn't going well and that public support for it is evaporating. During his visit to Iraq, where he spent hours with U.S. military officers in the field, Wolf says that his eyes were opened. "Some of the things that were told to me, I had never seen before: the destabilization of the region," Wolf told me. "Some of the scenarios that were given to me [included] the overthrow of the Saudi government, [along with both] the Jordanian government and the Egyptian government.... So I just felt, let's take another look. And no one should be afraid of doing it."

Holy Crap! The DIA's noticed that if we took out our allies and business partners that would tank Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iraqi insurgency! We gotta do something quick! Call in the Senator from MBNA and let's get the DINOcrats on board!

The president may have had another political motive for giving his blessing to the endeavor. If--and it's a very big if--Baker can forge a consensus plan on what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee--whoever he (or she) is--will have a hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans.

Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat and foreign-policy wise man. Working with a quartet of think tanks--the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy--Baker and Hamilton recruited a star-studded task force, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans include Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director; Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Justice; Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator; and Edwin Meese III, attorney general under President Reagan. The Democrats are William Perry, President Clinton's secretary of defense; Charles Robb, the former Virginia senator; Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff; and Vernon Jordan, the lawyer and Friend of Bill...

You got that right. The Big Dog's boys and the inner power circle of the DLC is working with James Baker and the Company to keep the Reptilicans in charge.

...Since April, operating almost entirely under the radar, the task force has spawned four working groups, recruiting scores of U.S. experts on Iraq and the Middle East to look at military and security issues, Iraqi politics, reconstruction, and the regional and strategic environment surrounding the war. Among the participants in these working groups are former ambassadors and State Department officials, intelligence officers from the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community, and think-tank denizens from the RAND Corporation, the Nixon Center, the Henry L. Stimson Center, the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Middle East Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and others, along with a panel of retired military officers: three army generals, an air-force general, and an admiral.

But according to all accounts, the Iraq Study Group is Baker's show, with the assembled cast of characters there to give Baker the bipartisan, protective coloration he needs. "Jim Baker is the gatekeeper," one task-force participant told me, insisting on anonymity. "He's by far the most dynamic, and everyone else is intimidated by him..."

Several of those involved in the task force point out that Baker is perfect for the job. "First of all, he's close to Bush 41," one of them told me. "Second, Bush 43 owes his presidency to Jim Baker because of the skullduggery in Florida in 2000. And Baker is the consummate consigliere. He's utterly ruthless and very effective at what he does. When they [the Bushes] get into an emergency, they call Baker."

The emergency, in this case, is the collapse of public support for the war in Iraq, the president's catastrophic fall in the polls, the growing calls on the left for a pullout of U.S. forces, and the concern at the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the Pentagon's inability to sustain the presence of 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely...

"...The object of our policy has to be to get our little white asses out of there as soon as possible," another working-group participant told me. To do that, he said, Baker must confront the president "like the way a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, 'Look, my friend, it's time to change.'"

Ah yes, the offer Dear Leader can not refuse, lest he be invited Onward as Martyr for the Cause.

Isn't that what friends are for?  ¶ 6:20 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Cooked Books Letting Them Serve Man

What's the real federal deficit?
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY

The federal government keeps two sets of books.

The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.

The set the government doesn't talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government's accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included — as the board that sets accounting rules is considering — the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

Congress has written its own accounting rules — which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs...

The audited financial statement — prepared by the Treasury Department — reveals a federal government in far worse financial shape than official budget reports indicate, a USA TODAY analysis found. The government has run a deficit of $2.9 trillion since 1997, according to the audited number. The official deficit since then is just $729 billion. The difference is equal to an entire year's worth of federal spending.

Congress and the president are able to report a lower deficit mostly because they don't count the growing burden of future pensions and medical care for federal retirees and military personnel. These obligations are so large and are growing so fast that budget surpluses of the late 1990s actually were deficits when the costs are included.

The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years. The audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion.

In addition, neither of these figures counts the financial deterioration in Social Security or Medicare. Including these retirement programs in the bottom line, as proposed by a board that oversees accounting methods used by the federal government, would show the government running annual deficits of trillions of dollars.

The Bush administration opposes including Social Security and Medicare in the audited deficit. Its reason: Congress can cancel or cut the retirement programs at any time, so they should not be considered a government liability for accounting purposes. ..

The government's record-keeping was in such disarray 15 years ago that both parties agreed drastic steps were needed. Congress and two presidents took a series of actions from 1990 to 1996 that:

• Created the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board to establish accounting rules, a role similar to what the powerful Financial Accounting Standards Board does for corporations.

• Added chief financial officers to all major government departments and agencies.

• Required annual audited financial reports of those departments and agencies.

• Ordered the Treasury Department to publish, for the first time, a comprehensive annual financial report for the federal government — an audited report like those published every year by corporations.

These laws have dramatically improved federal financial reporting. Today, 18 of 24 departments and agencies produce annual reports certified by auditors. (The others, including the Defense Department, still have record-keeping troubles so severe that auditors refuse to certify the reliability of their books, according to the government's annual report.)

The culmination of improved record-keeping is the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," an annual report similar to a corporate annual report. (The 158-page report for 2005 is available online at fms.treas.gov/fr/index.html.)

The House Budget Committee has tried to increase the prominence of the audited financial results. When the House passed its version of a budget this year, it included Cooper's proposal asking Bush to add the audited numbers to the annual budget he submits to Congress. The request died when the House and Senate couldn't agree on a budget. Cooper has reintroduced the proposal.

The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, established under the first President Bush in 1990 to set federal accounting rules, is considering adding Social Security and Medicare to the government's audited bottom line. ..

Tom Allen, who will become the chairman of the federal accounting board in December, says sound accounting principles require that financial statements reflect the economic value of an obligation.

"It's hard to argue that there's no economic substance to the promises made for Social Security and Medicare," he says.

Social Security and Medicare should be reflected in the bottom line because that's the most important number in any financial report, Allen says.

"The point of the number is to tell the public: Did the government's financial condition improve or deteriorate over the last year?" he says.

If you count Social Security and Medicare, the federal government's financial health got $3.5 trillion worse last year.

But they're only trying have government work to serve us all.  ¶ 9:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Oil Must Flow

Or not, particularly when there's a profit to be made and a good excuse.

Ask a silly question, and Greg Palast's answer keeps emerging.

And while we're talking about the Great Game, here's a reason for Dear Leader and the Company to support Israel even though they don't have the same amount of oil as their neighbors: if you could build some pipelines to it, it'd be a really friendly port.

When thinking about peak oil, it's interesting to compare and contrast the data- or the disinformation.

Which ever scenario you lay your money on, gone by 2075 or by 2400, you can bet you aren't the only person betting.

Any factor that slows the flow and raises the price hedges the bets of those betting on the longer curves.

Any factor that slows the flow and raises the price helps the long term schemes of practically all of the major players behind the Great Game here at home and abroad.  ¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments links to this post

  In Praise of Better Chocolate Rations

Joe Loserman sez it's all been good.

But he can't outdo Darth Rumsfeld's enablers.  ¶ 7:08 AM 0 comments links to this post

  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.  ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  That was then, this is now

Nature 442, 485 (3 August 2006) | doi:10.1038/442485a; Published online 2 August 2006

No more protection

Cutting NASA's science budgets is one thing; rejecting the agency's historic role in the study of Earth is something else entirely.

Ten years ago this month, NASA scientists found possible evidence for life on Mars in a meteorite, kick-starting the nascent discipline of astrobiology (Science 273, 924–930; 1996). That particular evidence has not stood the test of time, and the infant discipline has also disappointed some.

But the astrobiological vision of a Universe that had a role for biology as well as for chemistry and physics was a powerful one. It linked the study of some 4 billion years of life on Earth with a yearning for hints of life beyond. It was a vision that balanced the outward urge to explore space with an inward appreciation of the sort of world from which we set out and to which we come home. This is the sort of balance that NASA needs today — and which, to judge from a contentious change in the space agency's mission statement, its leadership seems happy to lose.

The agency's current priority, set by President George W. Bush and so far acquiesced to by Congress, is to inaugurate a new age of human exploration. This effort, by no means assured of success, will require cuts in spending elsewhere. Science — never NASA's core concern, nor ever meant to be — has suffered as a result. The most recent potential victim is scientific research on the International Space Station, which the agency seems to have considered putting on hold for a couple of years...

President Bush's call for human exploration of the Solar System's more accessible deserts is described as a "vision for space exploration", but this puts the cart before the horse. Although NASA needs direction and leadership, it is a producer of visions as much as their consumer. The Apollo programme, for example, provided a vision of America at its 'can do' best, with an impressive blend of corporate effectiveness, esprit de corps and extraordinary technical achievement.

Apollo also played a key role in perhaps the greatest of the visions NASA has given the world — that of Earth from space. No images from any of the Apollo missions speak more powerfully than those of Earth rising above the barren Moon, or of Earth alone in space, the Sahara golden, the Antarctic diamond white, the clouds and seas and surfaces between them ineffably rich and complex. Winning a new point of view beyond the surface of Earth has provided nothing aesthetically, spiritually or intellectually more important than the ability to look back at our planet below. NASA, as its more poetically inclined supporters have pointed out before, thus embodies the wisdom of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding":

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This vision from outside is not only inspiring; it is also empowering, providing a fresh way of studying the Earth. As the population dependent on Earth's resources grows, and its perturbations of the planet's atmosphere and ecosystems escalate, studies of the processes being perturbed become ever more valuable...

That is why recent changes to NASA's mission statement are more disturbing than any single cut could be. The goals in the mission statement, developed through a thorough set of consultations earlier this decade, used to begin "to understand and protect our home planet". This imperative is now gone, replaced by a commitment to "pioneering the future".

NASA administrator Michael Griffin argues that the agency is still committed to Earth science through the part of its mission statement that commits it to "scientific discovery", and that what "protect" meant was never clear. For all that, the excision still echoes the only decent scene in the movie Superman III: "I hope you don't expect me to save you," that other icon of the American way informs a damsel in distress, "cause I don't do that any more." Except this time there's no artificial kryptonite to pin the blame on. And it's not funny...

This situation should not be allowed to continue. Employees, grantees and others with a stake in the agency should press hard to have the change reversed. A NASA that does not see its interest in the living Earth as essential is as much of a betrayal as a Superman without altruism.

Or a democracy with stolen elections.  ¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Conyer's Iraq Report to the 109th Congress

In chapters here

or

The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution,
and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance (This Report is over 350 pages, the full length .pdf)

Bill of Rights, it was nice to know ya.  ¶ 10:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Hostile Takeover

Israel expands attack
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israel’s pounding of Hezbollah positions across Lebanon expanded Friday with missiles targeting bridges in the Christian heartland north of Beirut for the first time, an attack that further isolates Lebanon from the outside world...

Israel’s United Nations ambassador, Dan Gillerman, said that Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s offer of a truce was “a sign of weakness ... and he may be looking for a way out.”

Obviously a sign of weakness. Or sanity, which amounts to the same thing to the Likudniks.

Gillerman warned against Hezbollah threats to launch rockets on Israel’s commercial center of Tel Aviv. “We are ready for it, and I am sure that he (Nasrallah), as well as his sponsors, realize the consequences of doing something as unimaginable and crazy as that,” the Israeli ambassador told CNN early Friday...

Crazy is as crazy does.

...However, the strikes early Friday hit the affluent Christian locality of Jounieh, north of the capital, for the first time. The bombing against the picturesque coastal resort marked a sharp expansion of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, which now threatens Christian areas where Hezbollah has no support and no presence.

I wonder how long MSNBC will leave that paragraph unedited.

In the hills of southern Lebanon, Israeli artillery intensified bombing overnight, sometimes sending as many as 15 shells per minute against suspected Hezbollah strongholds.

On the second front of its offensive against Islamic militants, Israel began pulling tanks out of southern Gaza after a two-day incursion, after aircraft fired at clusters of militants. The heavy clashes killed 11 Palestinians, including an 8-year-old boy.

Despite Hezbollah’s truce offer and continuing diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire, the Israeli army prepared to push up to Lebanon’s Litani River, about 20 miles north of the border, as part of its campaign to force the guerrillas away from the border and make room for a planned international force to patrol the area.

In the 24th day of Israel’s punishing onslaught, Hezbollah has shown surprising strength and has found its support in Lebanon — and among the larger Arab world — vastly bolstered. With calls for a cease-fire growing more intense, it appeared likely that Hezbollah would emerge damaged but far from destroyed by the fighting...

Since the fighting started, an Associated Press count shows that at least 530 Lebanese have been killed, including 454 civilians confirmed dead by the Health Ministry, 26 Lebanese soldiers and at least 50 Hezbollah guerrillas. Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said that 1 million people — or about a quarter of Lebanon’s population — had fled the fighting.

Seventy-two Israelis have been killed — 43 soldiers and 29 civilians. More than 300,000 Israelis have fled their homes in the north, Israeli officials said...

In his televised speech broadcast Thursday night, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah for the first time offered to stop firing rockets into Israel if it stops its airstrikes. But he also threatened to launch missiles into Tel Aviv if Israel hits Beirut.

“Anytime you decide to stop your campaign against our cities, villages, civilians and infrastructure, we will not fire rockets on any Israeli settlement or city,” he said in a taped statement broadcast on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV.

That sounds more like a promise than plea to surrender.

As always, Billmon is ahead of the game:

...the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it's closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America's occupation of Iraq and Israel's intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.

It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon -- perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel's failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

In other words, it's almost time for the ultimate "flight forward" -- the one that finally pushes the Middle East into World War III.

What's become clear to me is that the Democratic Party (even it's allegedly anti-war wing) will not try to stop this insanity, and in fact will probably be led as meekly to the slaughter as it was during the runup to the Iraq invasion. Watching the Dems line up to salute the Israeli war machine, hearing the uncomfortable and awkward silence descend on most of Left Blogistan once the bombs started falling in Lebanon, seeing how easily the same Orwellian propaganda tricks worked their magic on the pseudoliberals -- all this doesn't leave too much room for doubt. As long as World War III can be sold as protecting the security and survival of the Jewish state, I suspect the overwhelming majority of Democratics will support it.

And it is being sold, ferociously. A number of wealthy pro-Israel donors, including Ronald Lauder, the perfume heir, have given millions to something called the Israel Project -- a "public education" cum PR cum grassroots lobbying machine -- to fund a program specificially aimed at building support for a military strike on Iran. You can't turn on Fox News these days without finding James Woolsey or Newt Gingrich or Bill Kristol or some other pro-Israel mouthpiece demanding war with Syria and/or Iran, and painting it as the only way to stop the rockets falling on Haifa.

I think the moment when I realized the Dems once again were going to be -- would always be -- dutiful spear carriers for the neocons was after Howard Dean and company treated the Iraqi prime minister's recent visit to Washington as an opportunity to do a little pro-Israel pandering of their own. To my eternal shame, I initially defended this ploy as a necessary bit of Machiavellian cynicism -- a way for the Dems to protect their right flank from a president who not only thinks Israel is the 51st state but a red state to boot.

Cynical it certainly was. And in another situation I might have been justified in making allowances. It's a stinking, corrupt system, and to expect purity is to expect defeat. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that a party leadership that really cared about bringing the troops home probably wouldn't be so cavalier about trashing a guy who is actually a pretty crucial part of making that possible.

Of course, you can argue that smearing Maliki as an anti-Semite probably helped him back home rather than hurt him, but I doubt Dean and the gang understood the nuances. They just saw a chance to score a few political points with Jewish voters and donors while at the same time embarrassing the Republicans. (As if Republicans were even capable of being embarrassed at this point.)

The lesson learned from the Democratic reaction to the Israel's war of choice is that the Dems are only likely to oppose war as long as the war in question can be framed as a fight against Iraqi insurgents and/or Shi'a death squads, rather than a fight for Israel. But the Iraq occupation isn't going to fit neatly into that frame much longer. In fact it's already slipped out of it. The Dems -- always a little slow on the uptake -- just haven't realized it yet. But when the time comes to choose (for Israel, or against war with Iran) I fully expect to see Ned Lamont in the front ranks of the pro-war phalanx, right next to the last great white Democratic anti-war hope, Howard Dean.

People tell me I shouldn't get hung up on this because, you know, if the Dems get in they'll make sure the seniors get their Social Security checks a little faster -- or they'll keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of legal madmen or do something about global climate change or save the whales or whatever else it is that's supposed to make the Democratic Party infinitely preferable to the Republicans.

It's not that I discount these differences entirely -- although they're easily oversold. But compared to the fate that awaits the republic, and the world, if the United States deliberately starts a war with Iran, those other considerations start to look pretty insignificant. I mean, we're talking about World War III here, fought by people who want to use tactical nuclear weapons. I'm supposed to put that out of my mind because the Dems might be a little bit more generous about funding the VA budget??? I'm sorry, but that's fucking nuts.

The truth is that on the most important issue of our time -- the cliff that drops into total darkness -- the only real opposition left in this country is in the Pentagon, where, according to Sy Hersh, at least some of the generals are trying to stall the march to war. Plus whatever scattered resistance is left in the intelligence agencies following the purges of the past couple of years.

It is a stunning testament to the political devolution of this country that the most effective anti-war movement in America is inside the walls of the Pentagon or buried deep in the bowels of the CIA! But that is the reality, thanks in no small part to the Dems and the Israel lobby...

That's because there are still people in the Pentagon and the CIA who are concerned with the United States of America actually winning the increasing conflagration.

That's far from the concern of the Company and a certain private equity group, who have real money riding on their outcome of choice.  ¶ 6:20 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Trial by Fiat, Because Now You Trust Us

White House Proposal Would Expand Authority of Military Courts
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 2, 2006; Page A04

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said...

Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.

Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

An early draft of the new measure prepared by civilian political appointees and leaked to the media last week has been modified in response to criticism from uniformed military lawyers. But the provisions allowing a future expansion of the courts to cover new crimes and more prisoners were retained, according to government officials familiar with the deliberations...

John D. Hutson, the Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: "We know you're guilty. We can't tell you why, but there's a guy, we can't tell you who, who told us something. We can't tell you what, but you're guilty."

Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, said after reviewing the leaked draft that "the theme of the government seems to be 'They are guilty anyway, and therefore due process can be slighted.' " With these procedures, Fein said, "there is a real danger of getting a wrong verdict" that would let a lower-echelon detainee "rot for 30 years" at Guantanamo Bay because of evidence contrived by personal enemies...

To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree, two fewer than under the administration's earlier plan. Courts-martial and federal civilian trials require that 12 jurors agree.

Execution of an accused prisoner on heresay, unable to defend at trial, on the order of 5 out of 12 jurors.

They don't call him Darth Rumsfeld for nothing!

Avedon calls it right:

The administration's reaction to the Hamdan decision is apparently that they should simply set fire to the Constitution... the administration is openly trying to remove all of your fundamental rights...

I didn't find anything in the article to suggest that there is any limit to who could be arrested and sent to kangaroo court. Peace nuns? Vegans? People who don't stay in the "free speech zones"? T-shirt-wearers? Bloggers? Anyone?

Don Negroponte likes this one, too. Finally, he's got room to work here at home.

In another amazing non-headline, it turns out the PentaclePentagon may admit they weren't entirely honest with Congress about what happened on 9-11.

It seems there are some tapes that "prove" it (Thanks to Atrios for the link- and the continuous opportunities to bait trolls).

And anyone who regards them, the government, the NORAD tapes, or any information about 9-11 cynically is of course a conspiracy theorist.

Now they're telling the Truth. Always. Just because the Bible tells you so.  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Change in Tactics from Apocalypse to Armageddon

Shock and Awe
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Published: July 31, 2006

For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been possessed by the deranged spirit of Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes, I know that there are big differences in the origins of the two wars. There's no question of this war having been sold on false pretenses; unlike America in Iraq, Israel is clearly acting in self-defense.

But both Clausewitz and Sherman were right: war is both a continuation of policy by other means, and all hell. It's a terrible mistake to start a major military operation, regardless of the moral justification, unless you have very good reason to believe that the action will improve matters.

The most compelling argument against an invasion of Iraq wasn't the suspicion many of us had, which turned out to be correct, that the administration's case for war was fraudulent. It was the fact that the real reason government officials and many pundits wanted a war — their belief that if the United States used its military might to "hit someone" in the Arab world, never mind exactly who, it would shock and awe Islamic radicals into giving up terrorism — was, all too obviously, a childish fantasy.

And the results of going to war on the basis of that fantasy were predictably disastrous: the fiasco in Iraq has ended up demonstrating the limits of U.S. power, strengthening radical Islam — especially radical Shiites allied with Iran, a group that includes Hezbollah — and losing America the moral high ground.

What I never expected was that Israel — a nation that has unfortunately had plenty of experience with both war and insurgency — would be susceptible to similar fantasies. Yet that's what seems to have happened.

There is a case for a full-scale Israeli ground offensive against Hezbollah. It may yet come to that, if Israel can't find any other way to protect itself. There is also a case for restraint — limited counterstrikes combined with diplomacy, an effort to get other players to rein Hezbollah in, with the option of that full-scale offensive always in the background.

But the actual course Israel has chosen — a bombing campaign that clearly isn't crippling Hezbollah, but is destroying Lebanon's infrastructure and killing lots of civilians — achieves the worst of both worlds. Presumably there were people in the Israeli government who assured the political leadership that a rain of smart bombs would smash and/or intimidate Hezbollah into submission. Those people should be fired.

Israel's decision to rely on shock and awe rather than either diplomacy or boots on the ground, like the U.S. decision to order the U.N. inspectors out and invade Iraq without sufficient troops or a plan to stabilize the country, is having the opposite of its intended effect. Hezbollah has acquired heroic status, while Israel has both damaged its reputation as a regional superpower and made itself a villain in the eyes of the world...

Somebody must have talked to Olmert last night.

Up to 7,000 Israeli Troops Push Into Lebanon
By CRAIG S. SMITH and STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 1, 2006

MISGAV AM, Israel, Aug. 1 — Israel sent up to 7,000 troops into Lebanon on Tuesday, marking a significant increase in a ground offensive aimed at pushing the Hezbollah militia back from the border before a cease-fire is declared and a multinational force deployed.

The troops, backed by air support, tanks and armored bulldozers, entered at four different places along the border, moving up to four and a half miles inside to engage Hezbollah fighters and destroy their outposts and infrastructure...

Israeli troops may push northward to the Litani River, 15 miles from the border, cabinet ministers said following their meeting, which ended in the early hours on Tuesday. But the Israeli intention now seems to be to clear out a wide strip of land along the border into which an international force could deploy without itself having to fight Hezbollah, a cabinet minister said.

Israeli military officers said they suspected they would have a limited time to pursue their objectives — perhaps a week or so more — and were trying to map out their final goal.

If an international force is long delayed or does not materialize, officials said, Israel is likely to proceed to the Litani River, which marked the southern Lebanon “security zone” that Israel left in 2000...

This should take some of the international heat off of the Israeli government, even though it's a change in tactics that's bound to disappoint Darth Rumsfeld. And Tim LaHaye, too. There's just something he finds biblical about smiting whole cities indiscriminantly.

But who needs airstrikes for atrocity?

The conflict in the Lebanon has once again brought up a discussion about the use of fuel-air explosives and thermobaric weapons - this time it’s Israel’s use of them that’s been questioned. But armies around the world are building up thermobaric arsenals -- a trend that's not likely not stop any time soon.

Unlike normal ("condensed") explosives, much of the blast in these fuel air weapons is produced by the fireball. A cloud of exploding material does most of the damage, producing an overpressure wave of longer duration than a point source.

Different kinds of injuries are the result. Instead of shrapnel/fragment injuries, you get blast effects. As one study (a .pdf) puts it:

"Each tissue type, when interacting with a blast wave, is compressed, stretched, sheared or disintegrated by overload according to its material properties. Internal organs that contain air (sinuses, ears, lungs and intestines) are particularly vulnerable to blast."

And those wounds have made thermobarics controversial. (Colorful media reports of other effects like 'displaced eyeballs' are dubious, but persistent.). The U.S. Marine Corps, for instance, took exception to my Defense Tech piece about their new thermobaric SMAW-NE, a handy, hand-held device capable of leveling buildings. An article posted shortly afterwards in Marine Corps News insists that the SMAW-NE is not 'brutal' - a term that came from a Human Right Watch report - and that it is not an incendiary weapon. (You may remember the rumpus over reports of white phosphorus being used as a weapon in Fallujah "Lethality... is caused primarily by its concussion with secondary effects from flying debris from the target area," the article claims.

This does not quite agree with the analysis (.pdf) by Dr. Anna E Wildegger-Gaissmaier, who concludes that "the primary injury mechanisms are blast and heat," but this is typical of the debate that surrounds these weapons.

The controversy does not seem to have slowed down procurement, and the Marines are first in line. One of their latest purchases is the South African M-32 Multiple shot Grenade Launcher – the USMC are buying 9,000 of them...

You got that right.

In addition to hiring mercenaries private security from South Africa, they're making our weapons now, too.

But Darth Rumsfeld shouldn't be too disappointed, he can keep that Hollywood feel about his Fourth Generation War:

...And here's video of an earlier version in action - if it looks familiar, you probably because you saw it in the movie Predator. One of the big selling points appears to be the Direct Range Air-Consuming Ordnance (DRACO) Grenade (.pdf), a thermobaric round of supposedly radical destructive power – "when you absolutely, positively need to eliminate the enemy," Milcor says. (A full run-down on the M-32 by Military.com is here)

The M-32 comes on top of the 40mm thermobaric grenade America already owns -- the XM1040, which was "developed and fielded in record time" for use in Afghanistan, where its powerful blast proved very effective...

As with the SMAW-NE, the new thermobaric grenade has received very little publicity in spite of its effectiveness. (The Russians also sell a multi-shot grenade launcher with thermobaric rounds for urban combat...)

What does it mean, this term "combat?". There will be very little city left wherever these weapons are extensively used. Like air assaults, they wipe out whoever is in the way, friend, foe, or innocent.

Tim LaHaye's God, Jesus the Barbarian, would approve.  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments links to this post