"There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. .."

Now here's a Republican worth listening to. He's got it half right:

Leaving Iraq, Honorably
By Chuck Hagel
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page B07

There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis -- not the Americans.

Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited..."

This entire column is worth reading, if a bit unrealistically sanguine for the future of the Middle East. As long as the Middle East- or the Middle West- remains under the control of fundamentalist zealots and greedy men posing as fundamentalist zealots, the dragon's teeth of war are sown into the soil. There will be violence if we stay or leave.

There will be less for us if we leave immediately. When we do leave, Iraq will seethe like a cauldron of blood. But that's what it's doing now anyway. When the cauldron subsides, a new strong man will arise promising to do God's work, and the violence will continue.

It has to do with too many people using too few resources, and the value of the sand beneath their feet.

You may think it trite: but take away the value of what's underneath the sand, and bring water to the desert, and the violence will subside.

It all boils down to renewable energy and resource management. It would help if people could leave their bloody God and superstition behind them. But without endless war, where would the blank check be?  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Corporate Terrorism

Three British 747s down due to polonium contamination; possibly 33,000 people have been exposed.

Putin and the KGB may have been involved; but broadly accusing the Kremlin for a crime of Putin's is a little like broadly accusing the Pentagon for a crime of Dick Cheney's.

Like Cheney, Putin may have done this for Company reasons. [thanks to Laura Rozen]

There's even a Russian private security firm involved. [thanks again!]

Talk about embracing capitalist values. No wonder Dear Leader loves his Pootie-Pute.  ¶ 8:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

  An Offer They Cannot Refuse



More good observations from Bernhard:

A mouthpiece for the Saudi leadership, Nawaf Obaid, has placed an unofficial announcement of official Saudi intervention in Iraq in the Washington Post - and the Saudi 800 pound gorilla offers a deal: Stepping Into Iraq...

Now the Saudis fear the U.S. will leave Iraq and in effect deliver it to Iranian influence. They will not sit still over this and warn against any withdrawal at all. The warning is not primarily directed at Bush (see the intro paragraph above). But it is definitly intended to impress especially Democrats who are supporting the voters demand of a phased withdrawal.

"Just a few months ago it was unthinkable that President Bush would prematurely withdraw a significant number of American troops from Iraq. But it seems possible today, and therefore the Saudi leadership is preparing to substantially revise its Iraq policy. Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance -- funding, arms and logistical support -- that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years."

The ongoing civil war in Iraq would escalate into Saudi/Iranian proxy war.

Next there is this paragraph which I first thought to be a bit weird:

"Another possibility includes the establishment of new Sunni brigades to combat the Iranian-backed militias. Finally, Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high prices. The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere."

Can one threaten the U.S. with lower oil prices?

Definitely not - so this paragraph is the carrot for keeping the U.S. troops in harms way. Saudi financed Sunni brigades could take over Anbar, relief the U.S. there and defend Sunni Iraqis. Meanwhile the U.S. troops shall buffer and fight against Iran influenced Shia Iraqi. The U.S. would be payed for this with lower prices at the pump (that is - if the Saudis really can pump that much.)

That is the offer, and now again the threat:

"There is reason to believe that the Bush administration, despite domestic pressure, will heed Saudi Arabia's advice. [...] But if a phased troop withdrawal does begin, the violence will escalate dramatically.

"In this case, remaining on the sidelines would be unacceptable to Saudi Arabia. To turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis would be to abandon the principles upon which the kingdom was founded. It would undermine Saudi Arabia's credibility in the Sunni world and would be a capitulation to Iran's militarist actions in the region.

"To be sure, Saudi engagement in Iraq carries great risks -- it could spark a regional war. So be it: The consequences of inaction are far worse."

The Saudis do have a lot of expensive modern military equipment, but their manpower lacks and their performance in the field is dubious. A serious engagement with Iran would have uncertain results for them. Their own eastern Shia minority would probably try to have a violent say in this too, endangering the oil production.

The threat for a regional war might thereby be a bit of bluster. But the spice must flow and even an uncertain threat of a bigger regional war that would endanger that flow should be enough to get Wall Street thinking...

Do read it all. Bernhard goes into the NeoCon motivations that may lead them to turn on the Saudis. And as always at the Moon the comments are on target.



Or not. Cheney is uncertain whom to attack, yet the Royals hold many of his markers. They know where the bodies are buried, and they are willing to put a few more there.

His, for one.  ¶ 9:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Innovation Ends Where Idiocy Begins

More disinformation and delusion from Pravda:

Maybe Malthus was on to something, after all.

First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind’s growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals’ costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.

Ten years later, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet’s outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.

Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries...

Maybe Malthus was on to something, but what he was on to seems to have eluded this author completely.

Notice the key disinformation statement: "Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity."

Having experienced the heady explosion of innovation that was Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s first hand, with a few patents under my belt even, let me assure you, if anything, the modern market system squelched any innovation it might have accidently generated.

Innovation was caused my hundreds- nationwide, hundreds of thousands, of small independent lab competing but also co-operating in a spirit of exploration.

Yes, money was made. And as soon as big business smelled that, the hundreds of thousands of independent laboratories began to be gobbled up as government deregulated industry. Now, the advertising budgets of most companies who made their initial bucks off of research and development are larger than the research and development budgets.

As a result there a fewer, and less every day, new drugs or inventions being created. Or marketed.

...But today, it seems, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world’s supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind’s enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the earth’s climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.

The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy’s “master resource” — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that’s probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn’t a particularly good indicator of changes in energy’s underlying cost, because it’s influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes...

This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We’ve most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we’ve already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we’re extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we’re turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we’re spending steadily more energy to get energy.

For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. [“energy return on investment”] of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands’ raw bitumen into useable oil.

Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn’t the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.

Humankind’s energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum’s falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.

Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can’t push them back indefinitely, because our species’ capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they’re needed, isn’t infinite...

What total, utter nonsense. Where to begin to deflate it? Let's keep it simple.

As long as the sun shines in the sky, there is an endless- in human terms- source of energy.

In fact, all of our energy and economic base derives ultimately from the sun.

We're only at the beginning of our ability to harvest it. Sooner or later someone will decide to use the tools of molecular genetics to make tailored microbes capable of synthesizing methane, alkanes, and hydrogen from direct or indirect solar-coupled reactions.

Think higher hydrocarbons are far-fetched from a microbe? They can make benezene in yeast, so the sky's the limit. Only a lack of corporate-sponsored innovation is holding it back. But who am I kidding? Over the last 100 years the government has funded most innovative research, not the private sector.

Just something else for the Theocrats to drown in a bathtub I suppose.

But right now, there are still trillions of dollars worth of oil in the ground, and the people who would rule us won't allow a cheap and endless source of energy to be developed.

The ability of any individual to innovate is finite. But the innovative ability of the human race doesn't have to be so. The stars are ours, because we are made of the stars.

However, infinite innovation can't co-exist with an economic system, or a class of rulers, that would ride a dwindling oil supply curve downward over the next century as men who would be king fight wars for dominion of their small little world.

It's quite possible the human race can't exist ruled by such men either.  ¶ 8:34 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Command Performance

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 25 — Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Saturday to discuss regional security issues with King Abdullah.

Mr. Cheney was met in Riyadh by the king’s brother, Crown Prince Sultan, and government ministers and leaders of the Saudi armed forces, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

The meeting at the king’s palace, which lasted for a few hours, ended at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, a spokeswoman with the United States Embassy in Riyadh said.

The meeting touched on “the whole range of events and developments on the regional and international scenes,” according to the Saudi Press Agency, particularly “the Palestinian issue and the situation in Iraq...”

This seems to have been a Royal command performance.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — As President Bush and his top diplomats try to halt the downward spiral in Iraq and Lebanon, they seem intent on their strategy of talking only to Arab friends, despite increasing calls inside and outside the administration for them to reach out to Iran and Syria as well...

Specifically, the United States wants Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to work to drive a wedge between the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has been behind many of the Shiite reprisal attacks in Iraq, a senior administration official said. That would require getting the predominantly Sunni Arab nations to work to get moderate Sunni Iraqis to support Mr. Maliki, a Shiite. That would theoretically give Mr. Maliki the political strength necessary to take on Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militias.

“There’s been some discussion about whether you just try to deal first with the Sunni insurgency, but that would mean being seen to be taking just one side of the fight, which would not be acceptable,” the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic practice.

But getting Sunni Arab nations to urge Iraqi Sunnis to back Mr. Maliki in the hopes of peeling him away from Mr. Sadr is a tall order under any circumstances...

RIGA, Latvia, Nov. 28 — On the eve of a high-profile trip to Jordan to meet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq, President Bush on Tuesday dismissed suggestions that Iraq has descended into civil war, blamed Al Qaeda for the latest wave of sectarian violence and vowed not to withdraw troops “until the mission is complete...”

Let's get this straight: Dear Leader will not deign to talk to Shiites... except for his puppet Maliki. Or Cheneyburton's toad Chalabi, who also works for Iran. He wants to talk only to his Arab lienholders. But, he's also convinced Iraq's problems are Al Qaeda's fault. Al Qaeda being owned by his Arab creditors, of course.

Juan Cole thinks Bu$hCo is out to discard Chalabi's old advice and rehabilitate the Ba'athists into the government, which he regards as highly unlikely:

...Al-Dhari, a wanted man, is calling on the Arab League to turn against the al-Maliki government. Though Jordanian King Abdullah II is said by al-Hayat to be conducting a furious round of meetings with expatriate Iraqis in Jordan, including al-Dhari, in preparation for Bush's summit on Wednesday. [Link below in Arabic].

And Nuri al-Maliki, head of the al-Da`wa al-Islamiyah Party (Islamic Call [Shiite]) will make all those concessions to the Baathists over his own dead body. (Remember he is already being stoned when he goes to Sadr City; what do you think the Shiite masses will do to him if he kisses and makes up with the remnants of the Baath officer corps?)

Bernhard finds this Divide and Conquer (v.2) strategery unlikely, too:

Divide and conquer is the method tried so far by the U.S. administration to get a permanent grip on Iraq. To this means the Coalition Provisional Authority did distribute seats to the Iraqi Interim Government differentiated by religious and ethnic lines. It enforced a tripartition into Kurd, Sunni and Shia groups.

This strategy did allow for exessive U.S. influence until the Shia did win the election Sistani had demanded. The government under Maliki turned out to be depending on al-Sadr's vote and therefore a bit too independent from U.S. influence and at the same time too powerless to control the country. But to replace it through a strongman coup would have ripped apart the Bush propaganda tale of democracy, so a democratic way had to be found.

Now, a new variant of divide and conquer is in the making. According to the NYT's Helen Cooper the kernel of the current diplomatic rush is this:

* Achieve a split within the Shia part of the Iraqi society, specifically between al-Sadr and the SCIRI/Dawa parts of the government.
* Through regional friends press the Sunni (Baathist) parties to ally with the SCIRI/Dawa block and to give Maliki a more tame parlimentary majority...

For the following reasons I find it very unlikely that this desired realignment is achievable.

* The practical leverage Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have over the Iraqi Sunnis is overrated.
* As condition to use that little leverage these countries demanded a new initiative in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. This condition has been met in recent days, when the Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, pressed by his hero, made a sudden 180 degree turn from hawk to dove versus the Palestinians. But it is obvious that this is not a genuine Israeli move but one that will be reversed as soon as pressure from Washington decreases again or some forces in Israel or the U.S. want to spoil any real steps to peace.
* The Sunnis as well as al-Sadr's movement have been the ones upholding the national stance against partitioning Iraq. The SCIRI/Dawa fractions voted for partitioning the country. Can there ever be a compromise in such opposite positions?
* SCIRI/Dawa are much more under Iranian influence than al-Sadr is. Any U.S. success in Iraq is not in Teheran's interest. The Iranians can easily be a spoiler in this scheme and Bush has no intention to talk with them or the Syrians.
* The Sunni political forces are Baathist - SCIRI/Dawa hate Baathists.
* The Baathist think they are winning - why should they change their strategy?

Rice advisor Zelikow has resigned yesterday and it may well be that envisioning the inevitable failure of this new devide and conquer variant that made him take this step.

Also the Saudis being Waahabist Muslim hate the more secular Sunni Ba'athists. Al Qaeda may be a player- but they want Saddam's balls, too. They always did, which made Dear Leader's assertion of their alliance a transparent lie- or a fatal blunder- from the beginning.

Is it possible? Dear Leader and his Mayberry Machiavellis act like they still don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. I'm sure Osama says "Mission Accomplished" from his family palace in Riyadh.  ¶ 9:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Disinformation on Child Health

Behold, the Mysterious Black Box

An Epidemic No One Understands

Well, that's not precisely correct, although more work is definitely needed on it.

Let's look at the epidemiologic facts presented as the disinformation fluff from the Pravda is examined.

Pravda says:

..."People frequently blame air pollution for causing asthma, but its role is not entirely clear. Pollution does makes asthma worse in people who already have the disease, but it’s not known whether pollution also makes asthma develop in the first place. And in any case, air pollution in the United States has decreased in the last few decades. Living in a place with high vehicle exhaust may make asthma worse, but the evidence is “relatively weak,” the researchers report..."

These are doubtless related in funding sources to the same experts who doubt global warming.

On the other hand, there are some really well understood predictors.

Many are in fact associated with urban, especially lower income urban life.

While respiratory infection, allergies, and genetics are contributiong factors, among professionals there is no doubt. Crap in your lungs doesn't help. Bad air makes asthma the big problem it is, whether it's from smoking or air pollution or both.  ¶ 8:23 AM 0 comments links to this post

  On Secret Societies, Freedom of the Press, and What the Experts Say

Some people didn't like them, as outlined by this paranoid here. I guess even paranoids have real enemies sometimes, no? Thanks, Buzzflash.

Oh: and incidently, some opinionated people are on the record as dissonant and dissident here on the mainline storyline. But as we've said before, sorting the facts from the disinformation is a full time job. Thanks, Lambert.

May I suggest the good Dr. Sagan's advice?  ¶ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Making Murder a Statement

If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander V. Litvinenko, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said yesterday.

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste.

There is no antidote, and handling it in a laboratory requires special equipment. But to be fatal it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it.

“This is wild,” said Dr. F. Lee Cantrell, a toxicologist and director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System. “To my knowledge, it’s never been employed as a poison before. And it’s such an obscure thing. It’s not easy to get. That’s going to be something like the K.G.B. would have in some secret facility or something.”



In a quick search of medical journals, he could find only one article describing the deliberate use of a radioactive poison to kill. It was from 1994, he said, published in Russian...



Polonium will be undetectable by conventional chemistry. You'd need mass spectrometry of a highly purified sample. Or implication by scintillation counter spectra.

Yes indeed, that's another thing we can thank Darth Rumsfeld for.

Welcome to the new Cold War. It's so chill I bet you never felt it coming. And many more players are in than v.1. Any country with a nuclear breeder can get in.

Just think what a suicide operative and a crop duster could do...

Of course, the CIA or DIA would have easy access to this poison, too. Or the Saudis, the Chinese, the Paks, the Brits, the French, even the Aussies. But they'd never do anything like this. Right?

And the recriminations are starting to look like a house of mirrors:

...It promises to be one of the most bewildering and diplomatically challenging investigations in the force's history. Little more than two days since Litvinenko died after becoming the first human to have been killed with the rare, powerfully toxic radioactive material polonium 210, inquiries have shifted thousands of miles east to the vast interior of the Russian steppes, in particular the rusting relics of the Soviet nuclear trade and its burgeoning black market in radioactive materials.

The sheer difficulty of acquiring polonium 210 has though, for now, shifted the spotlight on to state-sponsored scientists working in Russian research laboratories and the country's massive nuclear reprocessing plants. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), obtaining the material would require a level of access unthinkable only the most well-connected of individuals - just possibly with state backing.

A United Nations expert in the trade of nuclear materials said the sophistication required to harness polonium's poison as a murder weapon meant it could not have been executed by a 'lone assassin', a madman with a grudge to take out. Such is the difficulty of obtaining radioactive material, it would have to be someone with skill and powerful connections.

And, whoever they are, they collected enough extremely rare radioactive material to ensure doctors discovered a 'major dose' in the frail, sallow body of Litvinenko...

The UN is expected to begin investigating which of the nuclear reprocessing plants the polonium 210 that destroyed the internal organs of the Russian exile may have come from.

First up, will be the principal plant in Krasnoyarsk, 600km east of Tomsk, a massive, remote structure notorious for the radioactive contamination of Siberia's major rivers. Although UN officials remain sceptical the material may have been procured on the black market, British police are though to be liaising with the IAEA on whether the rare isotope may have originated on Russia's flourishing underground trade in nuclear and radioactive sources.

After all, on several occasions in the past 15 years, Russian police have intercepted smugglers trying to carry the alpha-radiation emitting substance out of the former Soviet Union. In 1999 an army officer was caught trying to cross from Kazakhstan into Uzbekistan clutching a glass capsule marked 'RA 23-54' and a metal canister covered with lead foil. Under interrogation, he admitted it contained a radioactive mixture of polonium and beryllium, used in Russia to trigger nuclear chain reactions. He had stolen the material from the Baikonur cosmodrome, where he worked, and intended to sell it in Uzbekistan. Other cases involve the theft of several canisters of polonium 210 from a secretive research centre in the city of Sarov called the All Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics, a sprawling complex known as Russia's Los Alamos.

Beyond rows of barbed wire and troop patrols, experts have admitted polonium isotopes are still produced there. Disturbing reports of thefts from the site continue to surface. In 1993 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported that 10kg of polonium had gone missing from the plant. Two years ago the IAEA established that Iran has been conducting experiments with polonium 210 as part of its nuclear programme, possibly using material obtained from Russia.

Meanwhile, the National Threat Initiative in Washington warns that Russia's porous borders present little obstacle to smugglers carrying radioactive substances out of the country and that concern over Russia's huge stockpile of nuclear and radioactive materials slipping on to the international black market remained undimmed. Yesterday Vladimir Slivyak of the Eco-Defence organisation in Moscow, warned that radioactive substances are often poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Even so, IAEA sources say they have never confirmed a single case of polonium 210 being smuggled on the black market, indirectly giving weight to allegations that Litvinenko's death was a state- sponsored assassination.

But Litvinenko's death holds even greater resonance; claims that a terrorist organisation managed to acquired a rare, powerful radioactive material which was smuggled into Britain where it was targeted with deadly effect have caused much concern among UK security services. Officials are concerned that next time the target might be greater than the internal organs of a single human.

Intelligence sources said they had recently confirmed al-Qaeda is intensifying efforts to obtain a radioactive device amid new figures revealing that the black market of radioactive material is prospering. Smugglers have been caught trying to traffic nuclear material more than 300 times in the past four years, a doubling of such seizures.

It is little surprise that the man charged with investigating Litvinenko's death is Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's deputy assistant commissioner who has taken the lead in protecting Britain from Islamic terrorists. He is understood to believe that tracking down the polonium 210 found in Litvinenko could unlock the key to his death, the toxic material's very rarity the factor that guides British police to those responsible.

Officials from the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston and Porton Down, the government Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, will today continue studying samples of the radioactive material extracted from the tablecloth of the sushi restaurant where Litvinenko ate the day he died.

Experts maintain that the sample will yield its own 'fingerprint' which can be used to track down where the polonium came from. So far, all they can say with reasonable surety is that the polonium 210 looks likely to have come from Russia and must have been smuggled into Britain relatively recently; it has a half-life (the length of time during which is radioactivity declines by 50 per cent) of just 138 days. Whoever is responsible knew what they were doing, appreciating the ease and safety with which the material could be transported in, say, a glass jar without detection or risk to its carrier.

'For anybody looking to kill an individual using nuclear material, polonium- 210 would be the radioactive isotope of choice,' said a IAEA source. A perpetrator may have entered Britain shortly before 1 November, the date Litvinenko is thought to have been poisoned, and one line of inquiry is that they a may have fled London after administering the deadly dose, safe in the knowledge that as the first alpha rays entered Litvineko's body, he was good as finished.

No on disputes that Litvinenko had mustered his fair share of enemies. Some were dangerous, others less so, yet whether light can ever pierce the fog of claim, counter-claim and smoke and mirrors that characterise this case is hard to predict. Litvineko's dissident friends blame the Kremlin. The Kremlin blames Litvineko's dissident friends. Rogue Russian agents have been named, but still no central suspect has emerged.

Scotland Yard is thought to have sought the first tentative help from the Kremlin via Foreign Office officials. Officers too are examining four sheets of A4 thrust before Litvinenko by Italian lawyer Mario Scarmella on the day it is presumed he was poisoned. They reveal how Russia's security services 'had decided to use force' against Litvinenko for 'incessant anti-Russian activities'. But, in keeping with such a case, it is impossible to determine whether the documents are a hoax or genuine. The more outlandish theories speculate that Litvinenko's own allies could have been the culprits. Even by the Machiavellian standards of Russian politics, such a plot would mark something of a new nadir.

Moscow's elite has been stunned at the British response to the scandal amid suspicion that the whole affair was some elaborate lie designed to discredit a post-soviet Russia. Vladimir Kuznetsov, former chief of Russia's state atomic control agency, even came out to describe Litvinenko's death by polonium 210 as mere 'journalistic invention'.

They also point at the police's response to the death, which veered from an investigation into a 'suspicious poisoning' to 'how this man became ill'. Officially Scotland Yard has yet to launch a murder inquiry, claiming they still do not have enough evidence to rule out Litvinenko's death as an accident or suicide...

Certainly, Litvinenko's profile has never been greater. Even his most incendiary allegations against the Kremlin had played to little effect in Russia. Yet his deathbed description of Putin as a 'barbaric and ruthless' president played to millions worldwide. And, regardless of which direction the case twists next, the inquest and accompanying attacks on Putin from dissidents promise fresh embarrassment for the president.

The involvement of Russia's intelligence service also remains a matter of scorn in the Kremlin. Sergei Ivanov, spokesman for the SVR, one of the organisations that replaced the KGB, said accusations of an assassination plot organised by his service, were 'some kind of science fiction'. Sergei Markov, an analyst and Kremlin consultant, pointed the finger at renegade elements within the security services, still vengeful over his claims of corruption and murder among Russia's intelligence agencies. He added that suggesting the Kremlin arranged the poisoning was absurd: 'That is just a symptom of Russophobia, one of the main prejudices now active in Europe.'

Police will also examine the so-called Chechen connection, in particular alliance with the Chechen separatist envoy, Akhmed Zakayerebel Akhmed Zakayev, who lives on the same Muswell Hill street as Litvinenko and is rumoured to be on a hit list after the Russian parliament passed a law approving use of hit squads to eliminate terrorists abroad. Yet one nagging issue torments those looking into the case; Litvinenko was small-fry, an exile whose anti-Kremlin criticisms were largely ignored in his homeland. In London, only his closest friends would recognise him. 'Litvinenko just wasn't worth it. He didn't pose a threat,' one FSB veteran told The Observer

We may never know how damaged Litvinenko's insides were by the polonium, his body remaining so contaminated it may be deemed simply too toxic to touch. As his friend Alex Goldfarb said: 'It is like being exposed to Chernobyl but not from outside but within.'

This week police will begin questioning witnesses. Kovtun is likely to be among those to be notified to ascertain precisely what, if anything of interest, may have arisen in the Millennium Hotel. So too his business partner, Andrei Lugovoi who also met Litvinenko on 1 November. Yesterday Kovtun said the fact traces of polonium 210 were found at several different locations across London supported his claim that he was not involved with Litvinenko's illness.

The former KGB officer, told The Observer that he met Litvinenko that day principally to discuss a simple business deal. 'It's quite clear that we had nothing to do with it,' he said...

Quite.

Meanwhile, leave it to a master conspiracy theorist like Jeff Wells to dig this up:

...And then there's the likely radiological poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB/FSB counter-terrorist officer and author of Blowing Up Russia, an important account of 1999's false flag apartment bombing campaign that anchored authority for the as-yet unelected Vladimir Putin. A statement from the FSB implies that Litvinenko is not important enough to bother killing, adding "The man got sick. I would like to wish him early recovery."

Though I wonder whether something Litvinenko wrote a few months ago, after Putin impulsively kissed a boy on his belly, might have raised his Kremlin profile as a "person of interest."

From last July 5 (and thanks to a reader for the link, which is found now only in cache):

The Kremlin Pedophile
By Alexander Litvinenko

A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.

'What is your name?' Putin asked.

'Nikita,' the boy replied.

Putin kneed, lifted the boy's T-shirt and kissed his stomach.

The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.

The explanation may be found if we look carefully at the so-called "blank spots" in Putin's biography..."

Read it all. I won't go into the details here. But consider: Russian Intelligence may be telling the absolute truth about this and other Russian dissident deaths occurring recently. Anyone remember Anna Politkovskaya?

For Russian leaders, as well as Dear Leaders of other superpowers, it may be neater and easier to avoid entanglements to have private contractors doing pest control.  ¶ 8:20 AM 0 comments links to this post

  A Brainstorm for Darkstorm

At the Snowmass workshop, it was clear that putting a "sudden stop" to climate-warming emissions would require something more than investing in wind turbines. In one presentation, Jae Edmonds, chief scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, suggested that the only way you could radically cut emissions without shutting down the economy would be to replace coal and oil with genetically engineered biofuels, which would not only cut pollution but would suck up carbon dioxide as they grow. But making such a switch would require a massive expansion of agriculture, sweeping changes to the world's energy infrastructure, bold political leadership and trillions of dollars.

Then Lowell Wood approached the podium. At sixty-five, Wood is a big, rumpled guy, tall and broad as a missile silo, with a full red beard and pale blue eyes that burn with a thermonuclear glow. In scientific circles, Wood is a dark star, the protege of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the Reagan-era Star Wars missile-defense system. As a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California for more than four decades, Wood has long been one of the Pentagon's top weaponeers, the agency's go-to guru for threat assessment and weapons development. Wood is infamous for championing fringe science, from X-ray lasers to cold-fusion nuclear reactors, as well as for his long affiliation with the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank on the Stanford campus. Everyone at Snowmass knew Wood's reputation. To some, he was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker; to others, he was the embodiment of Big Science gone awry.

Wood hooked up his laptop, threw his first slide onto the screen and got down to business: What if all the conventional thinking about how to deal with global warming was wrong? What if you could do an end run around carbon-trading schemes and international treaties and political gridlock and actually solve the problem? And what if the cost to get started was not trillions of dollars but $100 million a year -- less than the cost of a good-size wind farm?

Wood's proposal was not technologically complex. It's based on the idea, well-proven by atmospheric scientists, that volcano eruptions alter the climate for months by loading the skies with tiny particles that act as mini-reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth. Why not apply the same principles to saving the Arctic? Getting the particles into the stratosphere wouldn't be a problem -- you could generate them easily enough by burning sulfur, then dumping the particles out of high-flying 747s, spraying them into the sky with long hoses or even shooting them up there with naval artillery. They'd be invisible to the naked eye, Wood argued, and harmless to the environment. Depending on the number of particles you injected, you could not only stabilize Greenland's polar ice -- you could actually grow it. Results would be quick: If you started spraying particles into the stratosphere tomorrow, you'd see changes in the ice within a few months. And if it worked over the Arctic, it would be simple enough to expand the program to encompass the rest of the planet. In effect, you could create a global thermostat, one that people could dial up or down to suit their needs (or the needs of polar bears).

Reaction to Wood's proposal was fast and furious. Some scientists in the room, including Richard Tol, a climate modeler with the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, found Wood's ideas worthy of further research. Others, however, were outraged by the unscientific, speculative, downright arrogant proposal of this . . . this weaponeer. The Earth's climate, one scientist argued, is a chaotic system -- shooting particles into the stratosphere could have unforeseen consequences, such as enlarging the ozone hole, that we might only discover after the damage was done. What if the particles had an effect on cloud formation, leading to unexpected droughts over northern Europe? Bill Nordhaus, a Yale economist, worried about political implications: Wasn't this simply a way of enabling more fossil-fuel use, like giving methadone to a heroin addict? If people believe there is a solution to global warming that does not require hard choices, how can we ever make the case that they need to change their lives and cut emissions?

...Global warming, as Al Gore put it recently, "is the only crisis we've ever faced that has the capacity to end civilization." The ultimate solution is no mystery: Among climate scientists, a consensus has developed that we must cut projected global emissions at least in half by the year 2050. But a few leading scientists have begun to suggest that reducing pollution simply can't be done fast enough to prevent a planetwide meltdown. "This is not a goal that can be achieved with current energy technology," says Marty Hoffert, a physicist at New York University. "I think we need to admit that and start thinking bigger."

According to Hoffert, the 850 coal-fired plants projected to be built worldwide in the next decade or so will emit five times more carbon dioxide than will be reduced under the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Add in 100 million newly rich Chinese road-tripping in their SUVs, and you can see why a growing number of scientists believe we are approaching a climate catastrophe faster than we think. Paul Crutzen, a respected atmospheric chemist who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on ozone depletion, recently suggested that it is time to consider "last resort" options -- including the idea championed by Wood and others to shoot sulfate particles into the stratosphere.

To his colleagues, Crutzen's willingness to consider deliberate intervention with the planet's climate is a sign that the debate over global warming has changed. "Here is a guy who knows more about the Earth's atmosphere than anyone else alive, and he's telling us that the situation is so dire we need to think about intervening with the atmosphere on a planetary scale," one climate scientist told me. "That's frightening, of course -- but from a purely scientific point of view, it's also very interesting."

That's not science from any perspective I'd recognize, nor from the EPA's or the NOAA's perspective either- at least before Dear Leader started muzzling them.

You know, it is interesting in the way intentionally making the air unbreathable always is. I have some words for some consequences from this for people living in a world whose climate is modulated in this fashion. Words like asthma. Or how about Congestive obstructive pulmonary disease. Maybe emphysema or lung cancer are better words.

What is it with these highly paid, highly educated, and highly connected idiots? They're Always trying to save the world from the very excesses their own payroll sources created. They're Always coming up with Solutions that will somehow continue to enrich the sources of their payrolls.

...Until recently, discussion of geoengineering -- intentional, large-scale manipulation of the Earth's climate -- has been taboo among scientists. [Flash news: it still is. Among real scientists, as opposed to industry shills, anyway.] The pursuit is widely seen as not only a dangerous distraction from the serious business of figuring out how to cut emissions but also as borderline immoral. Lester Brown, one of the godfathers of the environmental movement and president of the Earth Policy Institute, sees geoengineering as "another step down the road of actively managing the planet -- something we've already proven we're not terribly good at. The whole idea of geoengineering is based on an assumption that we know how this all works, when in truth we haven't a clue." Burton Richter, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, also dismisses the idea, arguing that "piling one un-understood problem on top of another un-understood problem is not very smart." The point was driven home a few months ago when Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a supporter of geoengineering, attended a meeting with Al Gore and suggested erecting a giant sun shade in outer space to cool the planet.

That's only somewhat worse than Brand's idea to whole-heartedly embrace nuclear energy to halt global warming.

In last week Correntewire's chicago dyke touched on solar obliteration by Dark Storm as an environmental Solution.

Brand's Bright Idea also could have some pretty devastating consequences:

In Green Mars, a large highly reflective solar diffraction satellite is robotically assembled in orbit around Mars and used primarily to increase the surface temperature into the livable range by focusing sunlight.

Until a corporate consortium with a fundamentalist christian puppet gets control. Because the locals decide life is more than mining for a company, the government decides to show who’s boss and accelerate the global change. With the right focus angle, anything that could focus (or block) enough sunlight to change the temperature of a continent-sized area by ten or twenty degrees could raise the temperature of a city-sized area several hundred or even thousand degrees…

Science is a set of tools anyone can use to explore the universe.

It is very powerful and effective set of tools, and the things it reveals are facts not Truths.

Once you use science a lot, you lose all respect for Truths, because they’re usually delusions.

Corporatism is a very different matter than science, although Big Science is now Company property. Unfortunately corporatists now control all private and public money for science. They set the standards. They, alas, are the people professionals have to deal with.

They usually want a job done. Corporate tasking isn’t science, it’s engineering at best, and at worst, salesmanship. The dead worst is when a suit wants a result from a method they don’t understand with consequences they can’t begin to comprehend.  ¶ 8:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Something to be thankful for

The Bu$h administration is trying as hard as it ever has to keep us all safe:

US interference 'allowed terror gang to escape'
By Jason Bennetto, Crime Correspondent
Published: 25 November 2006

A team of suspected terrorists involved in an alleged UK plot to blow up trans-atlantic airliners escaped capture because of interference by the United States, The Independent has been told by counter-terrorism sources.

An investigation by MI5 and Scotland Yard into an alleged plan to smuggle explosive devices on up to 10 passenger jets was jeopardised in August, when the US put pressure on authorities in Pakistan to arrest a suspect allegedly linked to the airliner plot.

As a direct result of the surprise detention of the suspect, British police and MI5 were forced to rush forward plans to arrest an alleged UK gang accused of plotting to destroy the airliners. But a second group of suspected terrorists allegedly linked to the first evaded capture and is still at large, according to security sources.

The escape of the second group is said to be the reason why the UK was kept at its highest level - "critical" - for three days before it was decided that the plotters no longer posed an imminent threat...

Who exactly was the Decider for that decision?   ¶ 8:46 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Really Bad Idea: Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right

Charlie Rangel is angry about the Iraq war, the one that Henry Kissinger has told us we can't win. Thanks, Henry, but most Americans figured that out before you did. Rangel saw combat in Korea. Kissinger has only seen combat on TV. That might have something to do with why Kissinger thinks our troops should stay in Iraq even though we can't win. Kissinger says that if we leave now, all hell will break loose and Iraq will never achieve stability. Never mind that all hell has already broken loose. Never mind that Kissinger said the same thing would happen if we left Vietnam--all hell would break loose and Vietnam would never achieve stability. Vietnam has become so stable that Presidents Clinton and Bush, both combat cowards during the Vietnam war, have made well publicized, utterly safe visits to the country Kissinger used to think didn't have a chance without us.

In my one conversation with Kissinger, which occurred on TV, I asked him if he knew anyone who got killed in Vietnam. He was completely thrown. He doesn't go on TV to be asked such small-minded questions, he goes on TV to pontificate and TV interviewers are happy to let him do it. Kissinger sputtered and ran away from the question, leaving the distinct impression that he did not know anyone who was killed in the war he managed. His memoir of the period does not mention a single casualty. If you have ever stood at the Vietnam Memorial and run your hand over the name of a relative on the wall, as my mother and I did last month, you can get as angry as Charlie Rangel does about people like Kissinger deciding how long our soldiers should be exposed to enemy fire in a war we know we can't win.

Rangel announced on Sunday that he wants to reinstate the draft. He said the same thing a few years ago but quickly let on that he wasn't serious. He's playing it straight this time and has already introduced a bill. Local New York TV news has given Rangel saturation coverage. You can see his anger and frustration building each time he answers another reporter's question about the draft. The point he keeps repeating is: "There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way..."

Here's the deal, Charlie, from someone who's as pissed about this war as you are.

The kids of Congress, the kids of their campaign donors, aren't going to be drafted even if you make all kinds of legistlation to force it, and ensure its equality.

Why not? Because the $ystem is rigged, Charlie. Poor people, middle class, or even not-so-rich people will fill the ranks of any draft force, or any forced national service, but the likes of Jenna and Babs Bu$h won't.

The kids of the wealthy won't.

And any legistlation you write will be shot full of loopholes to ensure they won't.

A fair, equitable draft is not going to happen. Ever. Drafts create slave armies, and you know who the wanna-be Masters wanna cast in the role of slaves? Here's a hint: they make less than a million dollars a year, baby.

However, a draft will create the kind of civil unrest and class warfare this nation hasn't seen since the 1960s. Which will play right into the hands of John Negroponte and the Cheneyburton Corporation's Homeland Security anti-terra'ist goons. Civil unrest will allow them to invoke the martial law they've been waiting for.

Let's end this war. Let's start pulling out troops today. That's the only way it's going to end. By ending involvement, not by creating the tools that would divide the children of the haves and the have-nots even deeper.  ¶ 11:31 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Mercenary Mouthpiece

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — Senator Joseph I. Lieberman announced Tuesday that he had hired a new spokesman, which is not in itself that noteworthy, except that the said spokesman, Marshall Wittmann, is one of the great career vagabonds, ideological contortionists and political pontificators ever to inflict himself on a city full of them.

To say that Mr. Wittmann defies classification is like saying Paris Hilton defies modesty. But in his peripatetic soul, he is a Washington Original, a man without a political country going to work for a senator without a political party.

Mr. Lieberman, a longtime Democrat of Connecticut who was re-elected as an independent and calls himself an “Independent Democrat,” has not ruled out becoming a Republican.

Mr. Wittmann, meanwhile, is a Trotskyite turned Zionist turned Reaganite turned bipartisan irritant turned pretty much everything in between — including chief lobbyist for the Christian Coalition, the only Jew who has ever held that position.

“Jewish mothers do not raise their Jewish sons to work for the Christian Coalition,” said Mr. Wittmann, offering one of many explanations for why that job was not an ideal fit.

“I think I’m the only person who has worked for both Cesar Chavez and Linda Chavez,” Mr. Wittmann said of the union pioneer who inspired him in the 1970s and the conservative Republican whose Senate campaign in Maryland he joined in the 1980s.

“I think I’m the only person who’s worked for both Ralph Reed and Bruce Reed,” Mr. Wittmann added, referring to the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and the top lieutenant to former President Bill Clinton...

Totally in character: a souless mouthpiece for a souless Senator. He's absolutely symptomatic of everything wrong with our national government, and very self-satisfied about it.  ¶ 10:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Holy Missing the Point



Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.



She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know...”

Dr. Porco misses the point, but apparently The New York Pravda is more than happy to broadcast her opinions- they fit in nicely with the Company's need to rouse their shock troops.

Let's look at the definition of the word evangelize:

Main Entry: evan·ge·lize
Pronunciation: i-'van-j&-"lIz
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -lized; -liz·ing
transitive verb
1 : to preach the gospel to
2 : to convert to Christianity
intransitive verb : to preach the gospel
- evan·ge·li·za·tion /-"van-j&-l&-'zA-sh&n/ noun

Science has no gospel. Science has no Truth. Science is a tool you use with logic to describe facts.

Science is a tool you use to describe the universe. But since the observable universe, and well as the observer's place in the universe, constantly changes, science is not set in stone. The scientific method, like any other logic construct, works regardless, but is not Truth any more than the associative and distributive properties of simple mathematical statements are Truth.

Let's not be silly.

Please, yes, deflate the grandoise delusions and the shambling horrors of the ancient religions. Science, and logic, are ideal tools to do this. The world, as Dr. Dawkins says, has suffered too long under the delusions of its God mythos. But don't set up "Science" in place of God.

Because when you do, it's no longer Science, or even science.  ¶ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Iranian Stovepipe Spin

Moving and manipulating the barrage of data we're confronted with into a useful form depends on the recognition of useful data. Recognition is one of the real problems of information analysis. Since the consequences of action on the incoming data make someone money- often quite a lot of it, we're confronted with many different inconsistent information sources that compete for our attention.

But it's always fun to watch the spin .

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House dismissed a classified CIA draft assessment that found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, the New Yorker reported.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the CIA's analysis was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites and on other evidence like measurements of the radioactivity of water samples.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," according to the article.

"A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it," it said... [thanks truthout]

Hersch says:

...In late 1982, Edward P. Boland, a Democratic representative, introduced the first in a series of “Boland amendments,” which limited the Reagan Administration’s ability to support the Contras, who were working to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government. The Boland restrictions led White House officials to orchestrate illegal fund-raising activities for the Contras, including the sale of American weapons, via Israel, to Iran. The result was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-eighties. Cheney’s story, according to the source, was his way of saying that, whatever a Democratic Congress might do next year to limit the President’s authority, the Administration would find a way to work around it. (In response to a request for comment, the Vice-President’s office said that it had no record of the discussion.)...

Once Gates is installed at the Pentagon, he will have to contend with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Rumsfeld legacy—and Dick Cheney. A former senior Bush Administration official, who has also worked with Gates, told me that Gates was well aware of the difficulties of his new job. He added that Gates would not simply endorse the Administration’s policies and say, “with a flag waving, ‘Go, go’ ”—especially at the cost of his own reputation. “He does not want to see thirty-five years of government service go out the window,” the former official said. However, on the question of whether Gates would actively stand up to Cheney, the former official said, after a pause, “I don’t know.”

Another critical issue for Gates will be the Pentagon’s expanding effort to conduct clandestine and covert intelligence missions overseas. Such activity has traditionally been the C.I.A.’s responsibility, but, as the result of a systematic push by Rumsfeld, military covert actions have been substantially increased. In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as “part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.” (The Pentagon has established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.) The government consultant said that Israel is giving the Kurdish group “equipment and training.” The group has also been given “a list of targets inside Iran of interest to the U.S.” (An Israeli government spokesman denied that Israel was involved.)

Such activities, if they are considered military rather than intelligence operations, do not require congressional briefings...

The Administration’s planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)

The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found...

Lambert discussess this in more detail here.

I wonder if this report by Hersch, asserting there's been no plutonium production, coming out last weekend, is at all related to this in The New York Pravda Monday morning?

At a place called Arak in the desert southwest of Tehran, behind barbed wire and antiaircraft guns, Iran is building a heavy-water nuclear reactor. The government says it will produce radioactive isotopes for medical treatments. As an unavoidable byproduct, it will also make plutonium, one of the primary fuels for atom bombs...

Or maybe it's the reason for this:

International Atomic Energy experts have found unexplained plutonium and highly enriched uranium traces in a nuclear waste facility in Iran and have asked Tehran for an explanation, an IAEA report said Tuesday.

The report, prepared for next week's meeting of the 35-nation IAEA, also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the agency's attempts to investigate suspicious aspects of Iran's nuclear program that have lead to fears it might be interested in developing nuclear arms...

Strange that as of this writing, the report hasn't appeared on the IAEA's website. Although, if you Google it you find it everywhere else. Just in time to get Cheney's next war on, too.

...and away we go!  ¶ 8:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Dragonspeak

...Science or superstition, the result is the same: The source of the Yellow River, itself the water source for 140 million people in a country of about 1.3 billion, is in crisis, as scientists warn that the glaciers and underground water system feeding the river are gravely threatened. For the rest of China, where the economy has evolved beyond trading rings for sheep, it is the latest burden for a river saturated with pollution and sucked dry by factories, growing cities and farming — with still more growth planned.



For centuries, the Yellow River symbolized the greatness and sorrows of China’s ancient civilization, as emperors equated controlling the river and taming its catastrophic floods with controlling China. Now, the river is a very different symbol — of the dire state of China’s limited resources at a time when the country’s soaring economic growth needs more of everything.

“The Yellow River flows through all these densely populated parts of northern China,” said Liu Shiyin, a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Without water in northern China, people can’t survive. And the economic development that has been going on cannot continue.”

China’s dynamic economic engine, still roaring at record levels, is at a corrosive crossroads. Pollution is widespread, and a nationwide construction spree, tainted by corruption, is threatening to overheat the economy. China’s leaders, worried about the unbridled growth, are trying to emphasize “sustainable development” even as questions remain about whether the party’s rank and file can carry out priorities like curbing pollution and conserving energy.

The Yellow River, curving through regions only intermittently touched by the country’s boom, offers a tour of the pressures and contradictions bearing down on China, and of the government’s efforts to address them. The river’s twisting 3,400-mile path from the Qinghai grasslands to the Bohai Sea seems to encompass not just thousands of miles but thousands of years — from nomads like Tsende sleeping under tents made of animal hair to urbanites like Peng Guihang, a homemaker living in a new high-rise building in the city of Zhengzhou.

In between, in the ancient, irrigated oasis in the tiny region of Ningxia, farmers plant rice in the desert and treat the Yellow River like a bottomless well. In a pebbled, alien expanse along the river in Inner Mongolia, an enormous industrial region has arisen in only a few years, spewing out so much pollution that a shopkeeper surrounded by factories scoffs at government promises to clean up China.

Most astonishing, cities beside the river like Yinchuan, Luoyang and Zhengzhou — places few Americans have ever heard of — are racing to become China’s next new regional urban center with almost hallucinatory building booms. Yinchuan, a modest, ancient capital, is building an entire city district for a vast government complex and is adding 20 million square feet of construction every year through 2011. Luoyang, once the capital of the Zhou dynasty, has built a cluster of futuristic sports stadiums that look like a grounded armada of metallic, alien spaceships.

From one bend of the river to the next, and the next, an evolutionary chain emerges: nomad to farmer, farm to factory and factory to city. It is the kind of change that other countries have navigated over centuries. In China, it is happening all at the same time...

Gyaring Lake and its twin, Ngoring Lake, are considered the source of the Yellow River. Scientists began studying the region after drought took hold in the 1980s. Grasslands were turning to desert, raising fears that the river’s source could be endangered. Eventually, overgrazing was deemed to be the root of the problem, and local governments began moving nomads off the land.

More recently, though, Chinese scientists have examined the region and concluded that the pressures from herding are only one part of a much broader problem. Mr. Liu, the hydrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other scientists discovered that the complicated water system feeding the lakes was in crisis. Underground water levels were sinking and chains of smaller feeder lakes were receding or drying up altogether. Air temperatures were slowly rising, while the old pattern of two rainy seasons per year was down to one...

Researchers found that the glaciers feeding the river had shrunk 17 percent in 30 years. Earlier this year, the official New China News Agency reported that glaciers across the entire Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which includes the Yellow River source region, are now melting at a rate of 7 percent a year because of global warming. The report also said average temperatures in Tibet had risen by 2 degrees since the 1980s, according to China’s national weather bureau.

At the source of the Yellow River, Mr. Liu said the combination of less rainfall and warming temperatures had thawed the surface layer of active permafrost and disrupted the underground water channels. Moisture is being absorbed deeper into the warmer ground, and less water is funneling into the Yellow River.

The warming trend has literally moved the ground. Some sections of Highway 214, the two-lane provincial highway, now gently undulate because of melting permafrost. The Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the technological marvel that recently opened as the world’s highest railroad, has already reported track problems from the warming ground surface...

China ranks behind only the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists consider the raw ingredient of global warming, though that is tricky to explain to a nomad who has never seen a factory. Instead, nomads remember the Han Chinese gold prospectors and fishermen who arrived in the 1980s...

The Yellow River has allowed Ningxia to defy reality for centuries: rice paddies soak in the desert; sunflowers stare up at skies that almost never rain. Today, farmers repeat a phrase handed down for generations, “Tian Xia Huang He Fu Ningxia,” or “The Yellow River Is a Great Gift for Ningxia.”

But is Ningxia a great gift for the rest of China?

Water shortages are at crisis level in many regions. About 400 of China’s 600 cities lack an adequate supply for future growth , and many are now making do by draining underground aquifers to dangerously low levels. Some coastal cities are building desalination plants to turn seawater into drinking water. Over all, China has one of the lowest per capita water supplies in the world and one of the most uneven distributions of water. Northern China is home to 43 percent of the population but only 14 percent of the country’s water supply.

To address that imbalance, the government has begun work on a grandiose, and controversial, “South-to-North” transfer project, which would pump water along channels from the Yangtze River in southern China to replenish the country’s thirsty north, including the Yellow River.

Officials say they believe the plan, potentially the most expensive public works project ever in China, is the best hope for maintaining economic growth in the north, but critics point to practical and environmental concerns, and are fighting to block plans for a channel through Qinghai.

Ningxia, while far too small to blame for the country’s water travails, typifies the challenges China will face as it weighs logic against history in parceling out water...

Dikes and irrigation in Ningxia trace to the beginning of dynastic rule, when the Qin rulers who unified China in 221 B.C. built irrigation for soldiers garrisoned on some of the earliest sections of the Great Wall. Farmers still plant rice on the same paddies tilled roughly 2,000 years ago.

Throughout history the Yellow River has spawned floods, and emperors who could not protect the people were said to have lost heaven’s mandate to rule. The Communist Party has built more dams than any dynasty, and the river is now a top-to-bottom plumbing project that many environmentalists fear is being plumbed to death.

For several years during the 1990s, the river ran so low that it failed to reach the sea. For the moment, engineers have corrected that problem, but the dams and dikes have accentuated a different one: the river is rising into the sky. The huge amount of sediment washing downstream is now pinched by so many dikes and interrupted by so many dams that it is pushing the bed of the river upward, which means as the river goes up, so must the height of dams to prevent floods.

In Ningxia, generations of farmers in villages like Yingpantan have paid no attention to how much water they drained from the river. Their work fulfilled a national priority still evident today, as some Chinese officials sometimes voice fears of China being unable to feed itself...

Down a potholed street leading into an industrial park, a brick building that was once part of a forced labor camp is now another sort of prison: the small sundries shop where Zhang Yueqing lives amid the choking pollution of one of China’s newest industrial corridors...

The industrial park sits along the river in the region that joins Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, part of an industrial colossus built in less than six years on the arid, water-starved land surrounding the city of Wuhai.

“The kind of development that is happening is abnormal,” said Chen Anping, an advocate for restoring grasslands in Inner Mongolia. “There’s no way this can be sustained. There are not enough resources.”

With one important exception: coal. The northernmost route of the Yellow River courses through the center of China’s coal country. Under the planned economy in 1958, the central government founded Wuhai in the rocky terrain as the coal supplier for the state-owned steel maker, Baotou Steel.

But the collapse of the planned economy almost meant the collapse of Wuhai. By the early 1990s, local officials were debating how to save the city and built three coal-fired power plants to provide electricity to the east. But the city still needed jobs. So officials recruited investors to build the energy-intensive, heavy polluting industries that other regions no longer wanted...

The strategy worked. Before 1998, Wuhai had four factories. Now, it has more than 400. Wuhai became an industrial model for nearby cities like Shizuishan. In June, the New China News Agency reported that more than $50 billion in industrial development was planned for the 500-mile stretch of the river in Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. Experts estimated that industrial demands for water would quintuple by 2010.

Many investors had arrived in Wuhai with a frontier spirit, heeding the government’s call to develop the west while enticed by the prospect of big profits...

Decades of strip mining had already transformed some parts of coal country into vast tracts of denuded wasteland. Rapid industrialization made Wuhai a pollution nightmare. The Yellow River itself was already one of the most polluted rivers in the world. But suddenly clouds of polluted air were drifting hundreds of miles east to Beijing...

This spring, the severity of the pollution problem finally forced official action. The State Environmental Protection Administration closed scores of smaller, dirtier coke factories. Local regulators demanded that other factories install better pollution equipment or face closing.

Some investors felt betrayed... [, but] ...a new consumer class ...must grow and prosper for China to keep rising...

The end of the Yellow River is still a few hundred miles downstream, but this is the destination China is trying to reach — a nation of peasant farmers transformed into a modern, urban country. And yet so many cities are expanding so quickly, at the same time, and often following much the same blueprint, that China’s urbanization rush has alarmed national leaders and raised fears of overheating. One recent gathering of city planners found that more than 100 cities aspire to become major international cities, while more than 30 cities have requisitioned millions of acres of land to build central business districts.

Along the Yellow River, major cities, and many smaller ones, are in the throes of construction booms, competing to emerge as dominant cities. In Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, officials are spending about $1.2 billion a year to build a government complex across hundreds of acres. It includes a huge provincial legislature, provincial ministry buildings, a government-owned five-star hotel, a residential compound for foreign entrepreneurs and an outdoor People’s Plaza that can accommodate 30,000 people.

This is a common development blueprint in second-tier Chinese cities: use government money to build government districts in hopes that they will become the equivalent of anchor tenants to attract private real estate development...

Rapid urbanization is already transforming the Yellow River region. Population in the region has nearly tripled since the 1950s. Government statistics show that roughly four billion gallons of wastewater are dumped into the river every year, double the amount from two decades ago. Every growing city, each trying to lure people and industry, is scouring for water. Some are building reservoirs; others are draining so much water from underground aquifers that several cities have reported serious land subsidence...

Indeed, so many large construction projects are so infused with corruption that urbanization has become a get-rich scheme for many officials. In the first six months of this year, Chinese prosecutors secured convictions in 1,608 major bribery cases, in which officials accepted kickbacks to facilitate construction projects. A senior official in Beijing was sentenced to death, and then given a reprieve, for embezzling state highway construction funds. In June, a Beijing vice mayor in charge of Olympic construction was removed for embezzlement and kickbacks related to non-Olympic projects...

This messy, chaotic process is ultimately supposed to help China reach its goal of becoming a “well-off society” by 2040...

Affluence, the lure of the dragon.



Sometimes surreality is the only human reality.  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Slavery is an acceptable economic option for the WTO

Woops, my bad.

This is satire.

But not by much!

Thanks to everyone that caught it!  ¶ 6:04 PM 3 comments links to this post

  Incorporate What You Can't Eliminate

After years of denial that our presence in Iraq is creating a civil war, the Company's instructed its currently favored pet Generals at the D.o'D. to take a new line to counter the Democratic insurgency here in America:

We obviously can't leave Iraq, because, you know it'd make the Civil War there worse.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — In the fall of 2005, the generals running the Iraq war told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq was imperative.

The American troop presence, Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said at the time, was stoking the insurgency, fostering dependency among the Iraqi security forces and proving counterproductive for what General Abizaid has called “The Long War” against Islamic radicalism.

This week, General Abizaid, chief of the United States Central Command, told the same committee that American forces may be all that is preventing full-scale civil war in Iraq, so a phased troop withdrawal would be a mistake...

That first gradual withdrawal routine was planned to put the control of what (they thought) was a pacified Iraq into the hands of private security contractors for Cheneyburton, and free up soldiers to fire their lovely weapons at Iran and/or Syria or whoever else the Saudi Royals were troubled by (generating more bucks for United Defense Industries et al.).

But you have to adjust to new Realities. The newest Reality is that to keep the control of the Senate out of Darth Cheney's hands, the Democrats have to listen to Joe Lieberman, the biggest DINOcrat in America since the Viet Nam War.

Hey, if they move enough red-state kids into Iraq, they can have their little party with Iran, too!

That'll work to save our way of life, alright...

There's Right, and then there's right, and never the twain shall meet.  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Invasion of the Consensus Snatchers

They're back, and it's not just the likes of Carville promoting Harold Ford either.


Smiles like crocodiles. Except for Murtha, who's looking like the only one there who sees beyond blind ambition. Yes, trolls, I know about Abscam. I also know he turned down the bribe offer at the sting.

Nobody's perfect, and Murtha's calling the shots straighter than Hoyer ever has.

Sirota's take is a good one:

...It seems that the "Yay Iraq War! Oops, Let's Now Pretend We Were Always Against the War" wing of the Democratic Party is trying to nationalize Lieberman's Nixonian model and apply it elsewhere. To understand what I mean, just take a quick look at what's going on in the race for House Majority Leader between anti-Iraq-War leader Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) and recently-reconstructed pro-war mouthpiece Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

In the last few days, both the Democratic Leadership Council and Hoyer's own allies on Capitol Hill have mimicked Lieberman's tactics in an effort to reposition Hoyer as one of the longtime leaders of the global anti-war movement. The DLC's vice president, for instance, proclaims on his website that "It's not as though Steny has done anything to undermine House Democrats in their criticism of Bush Iraq policies." Similarly, Hoyer ally Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) appeared on MSNBC last night to claim Hoyer has "been very supportive in the last two years for a phased redeployment" from Iraq and that "I don't see any difference certainly on Iraq" between Hoyer or Murtha.

Ah yes, haven't you seen those pictures of Hoyer wearing the tie-died t-shirt with the peace symbol on it, two fingers extended, stomping around Capitol Hill whipping votes to bring the Iraq War to an end? Didn't you hear those impassioned speeches Hoyer gave from the floor of the House saying it is time to change course in Iraq? Didn't you see Hoyer standing right behind Murtha when Murtha courageously changed the entire national debate on Iraq last year? No, you didn't. You actually saw Hoyer slithering around on the floor like a snake, spitting venom at Murtha and others who were working to get Democrats to take a tough position on Iraq.

Apparently, the DLC, Tauscher and Hoyer himself believe that the Members of Congress who will be voting in the Majority Leader race are very, very stupid people who have no access to the Internet and have never heard of Google or Yahoo. They must believe this, because it takes about, oh, 10 seconds online to figure out that, in fact, Hoyer led the charge against Democrats taking a strong position on Iraq, publicly attacking the House Democratic leadership for having the guts to follow Murtha's lead and get up the guts to challenge Bush on the war.

All of this is happening at the same time Hoyer is trying to position himself as the ethics candidate in the race. Granted, Murtha is no saint - but Steny "I Have My Own K Street Project" Hoyer now billing himself as Congress's new Bill Proxmire is as credible as Mark Foley chairing Congress's Exploited Children Caucus. Oops, I forgot - that actually happened, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised after all that this kind of up-in-your-face chutzpah is very much alive and well in a congressional leadership race...

The DLC, along with that tool of the Cheneyburton Corporation, Joe Lieberman, move to limit the damage to the Company's move to hegemony.

The logical next move of the Company is to step aside and allow- or maybe even encourage- the kind of terror that should make the gullible get back in line. The kind of thing that happened here in Detroit yesterday may indicate movement in the dark. As usual, Jeff Wells is seeing shadows, and though a lot of it is disinformation some of them may even be real.

...The disheveled kook is suddenly the most credible person in the room.

We've had more than a few of those moments this century, when a story breaks and bridges the disconnect between the world as we know it and the world as most presume it. A privileged gay hooker in the White House, for instance. British Special Forces in Basra, dressed as Arabs, shooting up a police station. A naturalized American waging a false-flag bombing campaign in the Philippines, escorted to US sanctury by federal authorities. The death of David Kelly. Sibel Edmonds' gag order, and the WTF? conditions upon George Bush's testimony before the 9/11 commission. Usually the news is quickly changed, ignored or papered-over. Sometimes, as with Michael Meiring, it's met with blanket silence by American media, and the silence itself becomes a kind of confirmation.

Daniel Hopsicker may be having one of those moments.

As anyone who's followed his investigation of Florida's 9/11 crime scene will know, he's researched Mohamed Atta's connections to a protected international network of drugs, guns and money-laundering. Atta's "brothers" were German cocaine playboys mixed up with Russian mafia, not Saudi fundamentalists. One German of whom Hopsicker has written is Wolfgang Bohringer...

Can you spot the disinformation there in that passage? Oh, Atta may have also had ties to the criminal underworld. That's what being a spook is all about.

The disinformation is in the term ..."not Saudi fundamentalists".

Prince Bandar say the Wahhabi are perfectly good world citizens.

Don't you believe him?

The most zealous of us constantly get derailed by their obsessions. Some of us are derailed in our quest by money. Or power. Or sex.

Or by the shadows on the wall.  ¶ 10:05 AM 0 comments links to this post

  With that kind of pocket change, he has a job

It's good to see the Bush economy has produced yet another entrepreneurial spirit:

DETROIT - A man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after officials say they found him carrying more than $78,000 in cash and a laptop computer containing information about nuclear materials and cyanide.

Sisayehiticha Dinssa, an unemployed U.S. citizen, was arrested Tuesday after a dog caught the scent of narcotics on cash he was carrying, according to an affidavit filed in court.

When agents asked him if he had any cash to declare, he said he had $18,000, authorities said. But when agents checked his luggage, they found an additional $59,000. When they scrolled through his laptop, they said they found the mysterious files...

Dinssa, who is from Dallas, arrived in Detroit from Nigeria by way of Amsterdam and was headed for Phoenix...

Coming into the country.  ¶ 2:45 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "Meet the New Boss...

same as the old boss"- William Rivers Pitt:

...Carlyle manages more than $44 billion in 42 different investment funds, which is an interesting fact in and of itself: Carlyle could lay claim to only a meager $12 billion in funds in December of 2001. Thanks to their ownership of United Defense Industries, a major military contractor that sells a whole galaxy of weapons systems to the Pentagon, Carlyle's profits skyrocketed after the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Some notable present and former employees of Carlyle include former president George H.W. Bush, who resigned in 2003; James Baker III, Bush Sr.'s secretary of state and king fixer; and George W. Bush, who served on Carlyle's board of directors until his run for the Texas governorship. One notable former client of Carlyle was the Saudi BinLaden Group, which sold its investment back to the firm a month after the September 11 attacks. Until the October 2001 sellout, Osama bin Laden himself had a financial interest in the same firm that employed the two presidents Bush.

...There is much more to this than Big George simply trying to shove Little George in a different direction, because Big George never travels alone. All of a sudden, two of the elder's main men - James Baker III and Robert Gates - are back in the saddle. Baker has spent the last weeks riding herd over the Iraq Study Group, a collection of old foreign policy hands tasked to come up with a solution to the Iraq debacle. Gates was a member of this group until he was tapped to replace Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. The Iraq Study Group is slated to produce some tablets of wisdom come December.

A third member of the Iraq Study Group, former congressman Lee Hamilton, is the rope that ties this curious historical package together. During the Reagan days, Hamilton was chairman of the committee investigating the Iran/Contra scandal that nearly submarined Reagan's presidency and haunted Bush Sr. until his defeat in 1992. In essence, Hamilton took Reagan's people at their word when they assured the chairman that neither Reagan nor Bush were "in the loop" regarding the arms-for-hostages deal.

History and investigation have proven this to be quite separate from the truth... It is worthwhile to note that the man who brought the most pressure upon Hamilton within Congress to be "bipartisan" and avoid a protracted investigation was then-Wyoming representative Dick Cheney.

One of the men spared prosecution in the Iran/Contra scandal, thanks in no small part to the gentility of Mr. Hamilton, was Robert Gates. Gates, then a senior official within the CIA, was widely believed to have been neck-deep in the plot. During the investigation into the scandal, Gates parroted Reagan and claimed not to remember when he knew what he knew about everything that was happening down in Ollie North's office. In 1991, he was nominated and eventually appointed to be the head of CIA by Bush Sr. During his confirmation hearings, according to the New York Times, it was revealed that "Mr. Gates [had] distorted intelligence reports so they would conform to the political beliefs of his superiors."

That sounds familiar.

Gates's nomination to the post of secretary of defense was field-generaled behind the scenes by James Baker III, who has suddenly taken on a muscular role within the Bush White House since the spectacular Republican wipeout during the midterm elections last Tuesday. Baker's return, along with the new prominence of Bush Sr., has been hailed in the mainstream press as a healthy step toward stability and sanity.

One is forced to wonder, however, which masters Mr. Baker is actually serving. Baker's Carlyle Group has profited wildly from the conflict in Iraq, which begs the question: will the bottom line, augmented by Carlyle's defense contracts, trump any attempts to establish a just and lasting peace? It must also be noted that Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, is currently serving as defense counsel for Saudi Arabia against a suit brought by the families of 9/11 victims. The connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royals have been discussed ad nauseam, and Mr. Baker is so closely entwined with the Bush clan that he might as well be a blood relative.

The weakening of George W. Bush, in short, has opened the door for an alumnus of the Iran/Contra scandal, Robert Gates, to gain control of the Pentagon - his nomination, as yet, has met with little Congressional resistance. This process was managed by James Baker, whose Carlyle Group made billions off the Iraq occupation and whose fealty to the American people has all too often taken a back seat to the needs and desires of the royal family of Saudi Arabia. These two, along with Hamilton, have been instrumental in crafting, by way of the Iraq Study Group, what by all accounts will soon be America's foreign policy lynchpin in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.

Behind it all is George H.W. Bush, former employee of Carlyle, who has somehow managed to refashion his reputation into that of a grandfatherly, level-headed, steady hand, a foreign policy "realist" whose mere presence will soothe and calm the troubled waters we sail in. Unfortunately, his "realism" is a significant reason the United States finds itself in its current mess - until the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was a boon confederate of both the Reagan and Bush administrations in their fight against Iran - and the team of experts he has brought with him have done more to undermine the national security of the country than any other three people one could name.

The winner in all this, of course, is the Carlyle Group. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.   ¶ 2:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Behind the excuses for war

...the real motivations often boil down to the availability of a limiting resource. Of course, if you happen to make a lot of money off of war, you might want to create insoluble problems that cause people to fight like caged rats...



Most of the human race will soon face what sub Saharan Africa faces:

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Tibet's glaciers may disappear within 100 years due to global warming, threatening China's overused and polluted water supplies, the United Nations said.

``Almost all glaciers in China have already shown substantial melting,'' the UN Development Programme said in its 2006 Human Development Report. ``The 300 million farmers in China's arid western region are likely to see a decline in the volume of water flowing from the glaciers.''

Economic development in the world's fastest-growing major economy has increased competition for water resources, which are only a quarter of the world's average per person. Climate change is one of several threats to China's water supplies, including industrial pollution, overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and weak enforcement of environmental law.

Shortages of water from overuse affect 538 million people in northern China, where 42 percent of China's population is supplied by 14 percent of the country's water, according to the UN report.

More than 70 percent of the water in the Yellow, Huai and Hai rivers, which supply about half of China's population, is too polluted for human use, the report said. Half of China's rural poor live in the basin areas of these rivers, it said...
[thanks to Buzzflash]

Melting the glaciers on the roof of the world causes a feed forward effect, releasing more greehnouse gases.

But don't worry. The Texas oil boys say it's another generation before the oil starts to run out. Those nattering nabobs of negativism should just drink crude. All 3 and a half billion of them.  ¶ 9:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Who Needs Spies?

When you've got Google Earth.

For example, for my Seattle friends, the listing for Bangor, WA:

Bangor, WA (2,364 nuclear weapons)
Weapon Systems: TRIDENT SLBMs, SLCMs
Nuclear Weapon Types: 1100 W76s/Trident II D5 SLMBs; 850 W76s/Trident I C4 SLBMs (inactive); 264 W88s/Trident II D5 SLMBs; 150 W80-0s/SLCMs

The ballistic missile submarine base at Bangor, Washington, contains nearly 24 percent of the entire stockpile, or some 2,364 warheads, the largest contingent. The Bangor installation is home to a majority (nine) of the navy’s nuclear- powered ballistic missile submarines and a large number of surplus W76 warheads that will eventually be retired and disassembled. In addition, approximately 150 nuclear sea-launched cruise missiles are stored at the base.

Here's a close up:

See all the nice hangers full of enough nukes to destroy all life on earth? Would you like their exact coordinates?

Before you start yelling at me for posting this, or for Defense Tech for pointing it out- twice- recall that the American public is about the last group of people to have this information.

Russia's had it since they were first built.

China has too.

The Saudi Royals have it, so Al Qaeda does, too. Besides, the CIA would have told them when they were Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan against the Red Menace.

Everybody in Seattle knew about Bangor 20 years ago when I lived there. A long time before Google. It was a target then. If there is a nuclear war, Bangor and most of Puget Sound will be hot plasma within the first 30 minutes. Everybody with the brains of a banana slug there knows it.

Are you chickenhawks scared yet? If so, good. I've been scared since they issued me dog tags in first grade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even as a six year old the idiocy of people thinking they could survive a nuclear war was apparent.

Do you understand why there is no chance we can ever surprise anyone with these missiles? Do you understand why it is pointless to have them? Do you understand why the rest of the world hates and fears us?

And do you realize the fundamental folly of Top Secrets that exist only to keep the complacent banana slugs complacent?

  ¶ 10:23 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Changes in the Weather

Stefan at Real Climate does an interesting synopsis on a recent Nature paper on the cyclic coupling of Arctic and Antarctic warming periods throughout history.

Typically, when Greenland gets warmer and melts a bit, Antarctica gets even colder, and of course, vice-versa.


Figure: The top two panels show idealised model DO [“Dansgaard-Oeschger”] events on an arbitrary time axis (in years), highlighting the phase relationship between Greenland and Antarctic temperatures: when a DO event hits Greenland, Antarctica switches from warming trend to cooling trend. The bottom panels show the “real thing”, the noisy data from ice cores. Note the expanded scale for Antarctica in both cases. Time here runs from left to right – normal for regular folks, but somewhat unusual for the ice core experts (my apologies to these).

...irrespective of the details: the new data from Antarctica clearly point to ocean heat transport changes as the explanation for the abrupt climate changes found in Greenland. We are thus not talking about changes primarily in global mean temperature (these are small in the model results shown above). We are talking about what I call a climate change of the second kind: a change in how heat is moved around the climate system...

There are very few possibilities to change the global mean temperature, a climate change of the first kind: you have to change the global heat budget, i.e. either the incoming solar radiation, the portion that is reflected (the Earth’s albedo), or the outgoing long-wave radiation (through the greenhouse effect). Temporarily, you can also store heat in the ocean or release it, but the scope for changes in global mean temperature through this mechanism is quite limited.

Changes of the second kind are due to changes in heat transport in the atmosphere or ocean, and these can occur very fast and cause large regional change. Think of your tub: if you want 10 cm higher water level at one end, you can achieve this by turning on the tap – but you can get there much faster by pushing some water over there with your hand, albeit temporarily and at the expense of the water level at the other end. That kind of “see-saw” (but with heat, not water) apparently happens during DO events, as the new data confirm.

The two kinds of climate change are sometimes confounded by non-experts – e.g., when it is claimed that DO events represent a much larger and more rapid climate change than anthropogenic global warming. This forgets that our best understanding of DO events suggests they are changes of the second kind. The same error is made by those who claim that the 1470-year cycle associated with the DO events could lead to an “unstoppable global warming”. A global warming of 3 or 5 ºC within a century, as we are likely causing in this century unless we change our ways, has so far not been documented in climate history...

What makes what's happening now different is that both poles are melting.  ¶ 10:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Worlds WIthin Worlds

This stuff really happens- showing that it does is what I do for a living.

Thanks, Lori.  ¶ 5:08 PM 2 comments links to this post

  The Company Strikes Back

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A purported audio recording by the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq vows to step up the group's fight against the United States, saying, "We haven't had enough of your blood yet."

The recording was posted Friday on an Islamist Web site and the speaker is identified as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Muhajer is also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri...

Great timing on the tape's release, incidently. Now, despite the fact that Bu$hCo still is the executive authority, prepare for increased incidents of terrorism- and terrorism alerts- as '08 approaches.

Much of the current war on Terra is being waged by patriotic private contractors. Who, incidently, are almost to a man Republican, and employed by major Bu$hCo supporters. Who would really like to see and end to chances for government by the Democrats, who might turn over the war to, you know, the United States Armed Forces instead of Blackwater, CSC/ DynCorp, et alia, ad nauseum. And of course, the level of involvement of private contractors in the war on terra has nothing to do with the founding of Al Qaeda by the CIA, or the CIA's support of regimes like Pakistan, who incidently also have relations with Al Qaeda. And their own weapons of mass destruction.

And they don't like our fainthearted allies who're leaving Iraq, either. Why, if they won't fight them by the school yard bicycle racks in Iraq, they'll just nuke London. And of course, they could never have time to stuff a suitcase nuke in the London Tube if they were busy fighting Brits in Iraq. And of course, they would never use such a suitcase nuke on Brits in Iraq, because...

But that's okay. Democrats=Terra'ists. It's that simple, it's a War on Terra, and we're fighting them there so we don't fight 'em here. Rinse, Wash, Repeat.  ¶ 7:46 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Out Basing the Base

It turns out the American Taliban did show up for the $election last week. Moreover, there was a sincere attempt to Diebold it. It's just the programmed global fudge factor wasn't enough to counter the wave of opposition among people who had begun to put one (Iraq) and one (Katrina) together to get two (major corrupt incompetence).

Bu$hCo was too incompetent to even steal an election, which is probably the real reason Poppy's back in control of the Company.

Frank Rich writes about this miscalculation today:

...As recently as April 2005, hard as it is to believe now, Mr. Allen was chosen in a National Journal survey of Beltway insiders as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008... he began with a double-digit lead.

That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a video camera. After belittling the dark-skinned man as “macaca, or whatever his name is,” Mr. Allen added, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet heard about from their children... Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew. It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn’t be blamed on the bottle.

Mr. Allen has a history of racial insensitivity. He used to display a Confederate flag in his living room and, bizarrely enough, a noose in his office for sentimental reasons that he could never satisfactorily explain. His defense in the macaca incident was that he had no idea that the word, the term for a genus of monkey, had any racial connotation. But even if he were telling the truth — even if Mr. Allen were not a racist — his non-macaca words were just as damning. “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia” was unmistakably meant to demean the young man as an unwashed immigrant, whatever his race. It was a typical example of the us-versus-them stridency that has defined the truculent Bush-Rove fearmongering: you’re either with us or you’re a traitor, possibly with the terrorists.

As it happened, the “macaca” who provoked the senator’s self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of immigrants. He was born in Washington’s Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a senior at the University of Virginia. He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen. In other words, he is an exemplary young American who didn’t need to be “welcomed” to his native country by anyone. The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have always built and renewed our nation. They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate “heritage,” are America’s future. It is indeed just such northern Virginians who have been tinting the once reliably red commonwealth purple.

Though the senator’s behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment rewarded it. Its auxiliaries from talk radio, the blogosphere and the Wall Street Journal opinion page echoed the Allen campaign’s complaint that the incident was inflated by the news media, especially The Washington Post. Once it became clear that Mr. Allen was in serious trouble, conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an “awful campaign,” not for being an awful person.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it was a hit on YouTube. It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black (Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. In this context, Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that the base did turn out for Mr. Rove: white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71 percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78 percent of last time. But his party was routed anyway. It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can’t-miss strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent Republican majority.



I find it particularly satisfying that American Jews overwhelmingly voted Democrat, despite the best efforts of the American Taliban to link the Democrats with Al Qaeda (an effort that's still underway).  ¶ 7:11 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Poppy Reloaded

A Bush in the White House, the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, Jimmy Baker, Robert Gates and now Larry Eagleburger making U.S. foreign policy, the neocons in retreat and the Sandinistas back in power in Nicaragua.

I feel like I stepped into a political time warp and came out in 1989.

-Billmon

Billmon's not alone in having a bad feeling about this.

See what Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, an analyst at the CIA from 1966 to 1990 says:

...Two previous presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, nominated Mr. Gates for the position of director of central intelligence. In 1987, Mr. Gates had to withdraw his name because a majority of Senate Intelligence Committee members did not believe his denials regarding prior knowledge of the Iran-contra scandal. The independent counsel in the Iran-contra investigation, Lawrence E. Walsh, shared their disbelief.

In 1991, Mr. Gates was confirmed after receiving more than 30 negative votes, far more than any other nominee to the position of CIA director had garnered over nearly six decades. Key senators were convinced in 1991 that Mr. Gates had a major role in the politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia. During his testimony, Mr. Gates, known for his outstanding memory, testified 33 times that he did not have any recollection of the facts of Iran-contra.

Mr. Gates became the first career CIA analyst to take over the reins of the agency, ultimately doing more harm to the mission and mandate of the CIA's intelligence directorate than any previous director - even his mentor, William J. Casey. His strong ideological agenda in support of the White House often led him down the wrong analytical road, causing him to be wrong about the central issues of the day involving the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the impact of ethnic violence on regional conflicts.

Some of his statements led to strong and unprecedented reprimands from Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III. In 1987, Mr. Shultz confronted Mr. Gates and told him, "You have a big, powerful machine not under good control. I distrust what comes out of it." In 1989, Mr. Baker had to stop a speech against Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev that Mr. Gates was going to deliver that would have compromised Mr. Baker's diplomatic initiatives.

As deputy to Mr. Casey in the 1980s, he developed a reputation as a political windsock, serving the director's extreme ideological agenda. During his 25 years at the CIA and the National Security Council, Mr. Gates repeatedly failed a critical test - telling truth to power, which is essential to the intelligence and policy communities.

In his previous positions at the CIA and the NSC, Mr. Gates earned a reputation as a micromanager (a trait he shares with Mr. Rumsfeld), lacking confidence in his subordinates and immersing himself in the minutiae of decision-making. This will not work in the Pentagon, the most powerful and difficult department in Washington's vast national security empire. He presumably would want to replace the senior civilian leadership that has earned the scorn of the uniformed military, and he will need a great deal of time to get up to speed on such difficult issues as Iran, North Korea and weapons procurement - let alone the challenges of the Iraq war.

Nearly two years ago, Mr. Gates turned down the position of director of national intelligence because of the endemic problems of the intelligence community. Now he would confront the even more serious problem of managing a $450 billion defense budget and the service rivalries in the Pentagon.

Finally, it is particularly troubling that President Bush, who marched this country into an unnecessary and costly war on the basis of specious and even fabricated intelligence, is turning to Mr. Gates, who has a reputation for politicizing intelligence. This suggests that the president is not open to real change with respect to Iraq; instead, he is circling the wagons with another loyal and obedient subordinate who will not question the wisdom of the pre-emptive use of military force in Iraq or the wisdom of pursuing "victory" in Iraq.

In appointing Mr. Gates to head the Pentagon, Mr. Bush is running the risk of further poisoning the tense atmosphere at the Department of Defense. It is up to the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to look past Mr. Gates' glittery résumé and to assess whether he has acquired the maturity and integrity to manage the huge military bureaucracy.

Politicizing intelligence? He'll fit in fine. Gates is Poppy's version of Harriet Meiers, for running the D.o'D.  ¶ 1:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Priorities

Galloway:

...Can you spell "subpoena?"

For the Democrats who will soon take charge of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, too, here's a preliminary laundry list of some of the things that need doing:

* A comprehensive investigation of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq and how it was perverted, how the mine was salted, and by whom.

* A thorough investigation of what pre-war advice was offered by senior American military commanders on troop strength, equipment requirements and strategy and tactics. Did even one general ignore the bullying from on high and ask for more troops, and how did Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld respond?

* Why did the Pentagon send American troops into battle without enough armored vests, armored vehicles, rifles, ammunition, food and water? Who's responsible for that debacle which cost so much in blood and money?

* Where did our money go? Billions of dollars of taxpayer money disappeared down various rat holes in Iraq, forked over to contractors without even so much as a handwritten receipt. Who got the money? What did they do for it? This is a fertile field that can be drilled for years, with a steady stream of indictments, trials and prison sentences.

* What about those no-bid Defense Department contracts that were parceled out to the Halliburtons and KBRs and Blackwaters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other more costly weapons and equipment contracts that went to big defense industry conglomerates accustomed to writing very generous checks to the Republicans?

* Why did an administration that was hell-bent on going to war, with the inevitable and terrible human casualties among our troops, consistently underfund the Veterans Administration, which is charged with caring for our wounded and disabled?

* What's been the effect of the grotesque politicization of the selection and promotion system for senior military commanders by the office of the Secretary of Defense? What failures have resulted from that ill-conceived action? What responsibility do those generals and admirals chosen by Donald H. Rumsfeld bear for the failure to prepare for and conduct effective action against an inevitable Iraqi insurgency?

* Who at the top bears responsibility for the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and the Guantanamo detention camp? A score of Pentagon investigations got to the bottom of the chain of command but declared that the top, in Rumsfeld’s office and the White House, was innocent.

* Who's responsible for breaking our understrength Army and Marine Corps with endless combat duty tours in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who refused all suggestions that the force was too small for the mission, and that 50,000 or 100,000 more men and women were needed in uniform? Who stubbornly refused even to consider the inevitable consequences of an Army so tied down trying to man these wars that it no longer could react to an emergency anywhere else in a dangerous world?

Simply put, the jig is up. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld have come to the end of their free ride. No longer can they act without thought or ignore the boundaries of the Constitution, the law and common sense.

Did they really think they could get away with all of this without ever being called to answer to history and the American people?

They all deserve what's about to descend on their heads. They deserve every subpoena. They deserve every indictment. Most of all, they deserve a reserved place atop the ash heap of history.  ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "We know there are things we do not know..."

What Jeff Wells says:



..."yes, we'll accept the gift of Donald's Rumsfeld's overdue resignation, yet Rumsfeld instead deserves to receive the revolt of our conscience and the judgement of the dead. American and international law ought to deliver humanity's verdict, and that they won't or they can't is why we're expected to dance in the streets when heads are made to roll for our pleasure.

But this is a hydra-headed beast, and none of its heads are irreplaceable. With familiarity it may seem otherwise, which strengthens the illusion of revolution at every changing of the guards. But a palace guards' change is a ceremonial event, which once meant more than nothing, and now means less. Now, it's for the tourists.

For five years there have been worries that the Bush crowd would do more than merely steal elections; they would do away with them altogether. But this is to misunderestimate the nature of late American fascism, which still needs the sustaining fantasies of liberty and representative democracy. Gains by the gentler, junior partners of the Washington Consensus serve this end, and present the impression of change while changing nothing...

What Avedon says:

...The Republicans do very much want us to think that the American people would see impeachment of Bush-Cheney as being in the same mold as the partisan outrage the Republicans committed against William Jefferson Clinton, but the public was outraged because most people understood that what Clinton had done was not the sort of thing that impeachment was designed for, and that the people who were getting on their high-horse about it were a bunch of hypocrites in any event. They didn't want Clinton's private life made, literally, into a federal case. But they know that what Bush and Cheney have done is another matter, and a public investigation of their high crimes will not expose rabid partisanship on the Democratic side, but more of the same on the Republican side.

The Republicans insisted on assigning an independent counsel to investigate the Clintons even though they knew there was nothing to investigate them for. They kept the investigation open and kept pursuing them long after it was clear that there was no There there. And then they made the fatal mistake of insisting on talking about a president's sex life in front of God and everyone, to the horror of most members of the public. Ken Starr's dirty mind disgusted America far more than Clinton's private missteps could ever do. The more they saw, the more it made them sick.

But it's not the suggestion that this president should be investigated that is sickening to the American public - it's the fact that he keeps doing sickening things and getting away with it. A majority of Americans want him to be investigated and, if he is shown to have lied about his reasons for going to war, impeached. They know that this is what impeachment is for - real, genuine, high crimes that have cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and the good opinion of mankind.

And the Rude one, of course: Time To Arrest Donald Rumsfeld.

Make no mistakes. We have a slim window of opportunity. If we don't end it now, the Undead will return.  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  James Carville is a Big Hypocritical Lying Idiot

Apparently James Carville wants the Dems to fire Howard Dean and replace him with Harold Ford.

I'm with Steven R on this one:

...What will it take for James Carville to shut the fuck up and recognize credit where credit is due. Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy has been vindicated by the across the board election victories this cycle. Harold Ford is one of the LONE LOSERS of 11-7. I like the guy, but I don't like where he stands on Issues, and I hate the idea of putting a Loser in place to head the DNC when we finally have a winner. James Carville is a fucking tool idiot of the corporate media and DLC Elites...

It's worse that that. He's the husband of Mary Matalin, Dick Cheney's personal political strategerist . Mary Matalin is part of the White House Iraq Group that created the Iraqi War. Carville has sabotaged the Democrats for years.

MyDD (Chris Bowers) adds: ...If Howard Dean is ousted as DNC chair, I will start a campaign for all small donors and all netroots activists to stop giving money to the DNC, DSCC, DCCC, DLCC and NGA. This is not an idle threat. Democratic parties and committees will lose tens of millions of dollars every year if they do this. Count on it.

If the Dems fire Dean and replace him with Ford, they become the DINOcrats in my book.

I like the idea of reconstructing the Green party for progressives if the Democrats go DINOcrat Liebercrat, shutting out Dean and the Democratic wing of the party completely now they have some power and money. I would like to see a technologically and economically progressive Green party, not just a club of zealots who want to take the world back to the technological level of the 18th century in order to "save" it.

More of an Al Gore kind of Green. You could run a thriving world- not just world, an interplanetary economy on genetically engineered hydrocarbons and hydrogen. DINOcrats, dump Dean and guarantee your extinction.

Indeed.  ¶ 6:14 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Irrational Exuberance

Tuesday, the state of Michigan voted to end affirmative action on top of the Democratic wave that happened everywhere else.

Atrios says he doesn't want to hear about stolen elections.

Somewhere did I hear something about being "reality-based"?

Chicago Dyke points out a stolen one in Florida nonetheless. 18,000 votes vaporized into the Diebold ether. I wonder what the real margin of victory of the Democrats would have been without Diebold? Did we simply witness a miscalculation in the program?

Can we afford to let this go?

Tom Englehardt asks: ...What Will Happen When the Commander-in-Chief Presidency and the Unitary Executive Theory Meets What's Left of the Republic? The answer on this one is relatively uncomplicated and less than three months away from being in our faces; it's the Mother of All Constitutional Crises. But writing that now, and living with the reality then, are two quite different things. So when the new Congress arrives in January, buckle your seatbelts and wait for the first requests for oversight information from some investigative committee; wait for the first subpoenas to meet Cheney's men in some dark hallway. Wait for this crew to feel the "shackles" and react. Wait for this to hit the courts -- even a Supreme Court that, despite the President's best efforts, is probably still at least one justice short when it comes to unitary-executive-theory supporters. I wouldn't even want to offer a prediction on this one. But a year down the line, anything is possible.

So we've finally had our plebiscite, however covert, on the failing Outlaw Empire of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But what about their autocratic inclinations at home. How will that play out?

Will it be: All hail, Caesar, we who are about to dive back into prime-time programming.

Or will it be: All the political hail is about to pelt our junior caesars as we dive back into prime-time programming? Stay tuned.

Sounds like they want to give you the programming either way.  ¶ 7:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Fix is In

Looks like between James Baker and Henry Kissinger, there's been a change in management in the Company.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld stepped down Wednesday, one day after congressional elections in which opposition to the war in Iraq contributed to heavy Republican Party losses.

President George W. Bush said he would nominate Robert Gates, a former CIA director, to replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon...

Rumsfeld, 74, was in his second tour of duty as defense chief. He first held the job a generation ago, when he was appointed by President Ford.

Gates is the president of Texas A&M University and a close friend of the Bush family. He served as director of the Central Intelligence for Bush's father from 1991 until 1993.

Gates first joined the CIA in 1966 and served in the intelligence community for more than a quarter century, under six presidents...

Looks like Gates was offered Black Spot's job as Director of Homeland Security awhile back, but Gates [or somebody] decided Negroponte was a better uber-spook. Like Negroponte, Gates was an unindicted co-conspirator during Iran-Contra.

Over at Correntewire, xan has an interesting suggestion: What if Diebold threw the $election to the Democrats?

My response: never forget the Company is not a monolith.

Look at what else happened today: the Negroponte faction of Iran-Contra got control of both Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

While both branches of Congress are marginally in control of the Democrats, that means Bu$h (and, incidently, the next Reptilican candidate for Preznit) gets somebody else to blame for anything that goes wrong, and still holds the veto and the $upremes in the Carlyle Group pocket.

And speaking of the world’s largest private equity, even though the Party controlling Congress changed, if you talley up campaign contributions, they still own Congress.

Yet the fact that the Theocrats were unequivocally the big losers nationwide is priceless- not only to you and me, but to certain corporate barons who were damned tired of the way the holy rollers mucked up business.

It's very possible Diebold heard money talk louder than Jeebus this time around.  ¶ 5:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  New Offices for the Ministry of Truth

...in order to try to counter the flow of awful stories and images emanating from Iraq, it looks like the Pentagon will transcend the traditional channels of information management and get into the media game itself.

An Associated Press story yesterday discussed a new DoD memo one of its reporters got a hold of that said that "new teams of people" at the Pentagon "will begin working to 'develop messages' for the domestic 24-hour news cycle."

So... this is news? From the same crowd that brags about starting propaganda wars?

Back to the CJR:

...But what might that mean? CNN.com followed up, and reported that the new operation is to have four branches: New Media, Rapid Response, TV and Radio Booking, and Surrogates. The idea is to massage the domestic media coverage of the war and of the Pentagon in general.

For example, the New Media branch will create "products and distribut[e] information" for the Internet, as well as through podcasting, DVDs and Web sites, including YouTube. Rapid Response will "Develop messages and products for the 24/7 media cycle." For example, CNN says that "In recent weeks, there has been an increase in Pentagon-written letters to the editors of dozens of news organizations." The TV and Radio Booking branch will "provide civilian and military guests for cable network and radio programs," while Surrogates will "Provide information and visibility to the surrogate community" -- which presumably means getting analysts to go on TV to express support for Pentagon programs, or for Rummy himself.

Or for others, do you suppose?

...This all has a familiar smell, and this administration's track record with clandestine canned news is rich indeed, from the "Karen Ryan" episode to the Video News Release scandal to Armstrong Williams and other pundits who were secretly (and lucratively) shilling for government programs. Just last week, the Defense Department Inspector General gave its blessing (PDF) to the Pentagon's effort to buy good press in Iraq, through it's contract with the Lincoln Group, which places positive stories about the U.S. military and the occupation in Iraqi newspapers.

That said, the whole operation seems largely unproblematic to us, provided one crucial test is met: Whenever the new office posts something to YouTube, creates a blog, writes a letter to the editor, or contracts with an analyst or friendly commentator to speak on its behalf, that it be clearly and prominently labeled as a product -- bought and paid for -- of the Pentagon. Other branches of the government have shown an inability -- and a decided unwillingness -- to come clean about their covert PR operations. Will the Pentagon be any different?

No.

I'm glad we could clear that up.

[thanks to David Axe for the tinfoil buzz]  ¶ 9:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Calibration Problem

Those unreliable voters insist they're voting Democrat when their Diebold knows what they really want.

It's like the Iraq war. Who could have imagined there would be election dysfunction again in Ohio and Florida?

[thanks, Woody]

The Dark Wraith has become aware of special training Republicam, but not Democratic poll workers in Ohio are getting.

Matt Stoller speaks of robocallers that won't give up until they finish their message.

Crooks and Liars' Jamie Holly has updates of her updates, as does the crew at Think Progress, and as usual, Avedon has a good round-up of the round-ups.  ¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  People of the Lie


Vicar of Christ meets the Voice of Sauron

Digby and Tristero have two posts that fit well together.

Tristero, regarding the NeoCon epiphany both for and against the Iraqi War:

...Question: After a war, how much wisdom do you need to gain to recognize the carnage? Answer: After a war it takes only as much wisdom to see it was horrible as it takes intelligence to blame others - Rumsfeld, the beaurocracy - for the failure of your crackpot plans. And that is exactly how much wisdom Perle has gained.

Why did Perle underestimate "the depravity" the world would see from a Bush/Iraq war, and spectacularly underestimate it at that? I have no idea, but it was not because he's never seen a war up close. I haven't either and I never underestimated the depravity to come from this war. Why did Perle fail to weigh carefully the very real probability that the Bush/Iraq war might result in a failed state where you'd get "all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating?" Again, I don't know, but once again, I didn't.

And I was far from alone.

Most of the world knew what was going to happen if Bush invaded Iraq. And to make absolutely sure Perle knew that we knew, and to bring the possibility that the Bush/Iraq war would end in chaos to his attention, just in case it happened to have escaped his brilliant mind, tens of millions around the world marched, not once, but twice, in protest. Millions of us wrote our governments begging them to do something, anything, to avert the inevitable disaster. Helen Caldicott even urged that the ailing John Paul II travel to Baghdad to become a human shield. And the Pope himself, face to face with George W. Bush, counseled a peaceful solution.

And then the war came. And the casualties began to mount. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dead or horribly mutilated. Tortures and beheadings. Atrocities even worse, too horrible to describe. And no end in sight no matter whether the US stays or goes - and the US isn't going anytime soon.

And it took all this to provide Perle with his learning experience. To finally have Perle say, maybe we could have looked at other means than war in dealing with the very containable threat of Saddam Hussein.

But you'd have to have been "delphic" to know that, Perle says. Yes, delphic... As if Richard Perle was a half-crazed woman ranting oracles in the mists. And Perle, he tells us this straight out, that's the last thing he wants anyone to think Richard Perle could possibly be.

But this post really isn't about Richard Perle.

When I first saw that article, like many of you, I was entertained by the spectacle of these scoundrels having to eat crow. But then I remembered that poor kid whose parents were killed and whose legs and an arm were severed by a bomb I paid for.

And I remembered that a television anchor asked the reporter on the scene whether the shocked, traumatized beyond all belief, child really understood that all of this happened to him for a good cause, the liberation of his country.

And after I remembered that I felt ashamed of my schadenfreude towards Perle. For he is among those directly responsible for the murder of that child's parents, and for that kid's own permanent mutilation. And he implicated me, and you, in that murder and gore as well, despite the fact that we protested loud and long. And he helped create the ghastly environment of immoral self-righteousness reflected in that anchor's remarks. And he urged it happen. He wanted it to happen. He rejoiced when it happened. He wants it to happen again in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere.

And I felt ashamed that this country's public discourse is even now still so unspeakably corrupt that people as morally sick as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Ken Adelman still have access to a wide public. And I felt furious that while Vanity Fair fusses to find the most elegant way to fling Perle's shit at America, the rest of us can only wait anxiously for the inevitable catastrophes, the direct result of the advice and avid support of these people, to unfold, with little opportunity to guide the discourse back to anything close to sanity.

A longtime ago, the summer of '03, I think it was, I wrote a private letter to Josh Marshall. I had just seen a video of him and Perle on a panel at, I think, American Enterprise Institute, discuss the Iraq War. Perle was unbearably coarse, surly, and contemptuous, even personally nasty towards Josh. And of course, everything Perle asserted was dead wrong.

In the letter, I told Josh that he shouldn't raise Perle's status in the world by deigning to appear with him.

I never heard back from Josh, but I'm pretty sure that one of the things he thought was that I was completely uninformed and had it entirely backwards. Probably he thought I didn't know that Perle, a highly-placed adviser to a president and his war cabinet, was deigning to appear with him.

No, Josh, I knew exactly what I was saying.

It is high time that Perle, Ledeen, Adelman and the whole sick crew stop getting their phone calls returned from the media. And for the media to stop calling them. For truly, Perle is not Joshua Marshall's peer. Perle is Joe McCarthy's. He is Curtis Lemay's. Perle is a nutcase, a madman. He makes Ward Churchill appear a paragon of insight and integrity. As for not being delphic, he makes Anne Heche seem normal...

Here's the trick about Perle and the rest of the American Enterprise Institute pirates: they're lying.

From Big Time Dick on down, they all knew what the War would cost, and would bring: endless war and a bottomless pit of money for the war.

As Digby points out, the TheoConfederacy has almost formally codified the moral justification for unthinkable levels of doublethink:

...neo-cons and faith-based robots have spent the last few years mangling the discourse with so much hypocrisy, so many outright lies and twisted moral reasoning that they may have permanently built an alternate universe that they can turn to whenever the need arises. Witness two events that happened just last week.

First you had the John Kerry flap. After the first news cycle everyone knew he'd blown a punchline. There were even plenty of conservatives who admitted it. But that didn't matter. What mattered was forcing him to apologize for something he never said. It was a pure act of force, as if they put their foot on his neck and demanded that he agree that "up is down and black is white" --- a modern show trial in which Kerry agreed to confess in order to spare his party's chances in the upcoming election. He instinctively resisted, as sane people always do when forced to deny reality. But the sheer power of the coordinated Republican outcry (with the willing help of cynical Dems and the media) finally made it imperative for him to issue an apology for something he never said.

And the Republicans laughed and laughed because once again they had forced a leading Democrat to bow to their will as surely as if they'd physically held him down and made him agree that black was white and up was down. It was all the more delicious because every party to it, the Republicans, the Democrats, the public, the media and John Kerry himself all knew the real truth. Now that's power.

They pulled off a different, but related, gambit with something that was far more important. The administration tried to spin the irresponsible dumping of nuclear secrets on the internet as proof that the Iraq war was justified despite the fact that the documents were from before the first Gulf war. Even the secretary of state went on conservative talk radio and pretty much said "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes." Since it happened so late in the election cycle, it got lost in all the gay, meth snorting, joke blowing Republican effluvia of the campaign, but it is still one of the most audacious attempts at reality denial we've yet seen...

...The real point of this total disregard for reality is to force others to be complicit in their falsehoods.

They succeeded in getting everyone to agree that John Kerry should have immediately apologized for something he never said and they managed to at least partially spin what should have been a public relations disaster --- Bush personally ordering a project that resulted in arabic language nuclear plans winding up on the internet at the behest of their political fringe --- into a positive story that proved the Bush administration case for war.

These are bold, in-your-face challenges to what we all commonly perceive as reality. Frum's perverse moral view of Haggard's hypocrisy and dishonesty is the same thing. It's where the faith-based, the Limbaugh nation and the neocons come together in a Straussian orgy of lies and myths and pure brute force.

Winning this election will not change this. The political establishment has been trained in this method for almost two decades now and the Republicans are actually better at wielding this power as the opposition. I have no answers about how to deal with it. It's one of the most difficult challenges we face.

Justification of lies as furthering a moral cause that is in itself a lie.


But don't run. We come in peace.  ¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Right Referents for the Apocalypse: It Came from Beneath the Sea

Study Finds World's Marine Life Could Collapse By 2048
November 2, 2006 3:37 p.m. EST
Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Writer

Washington, D.C. (AHN)-According to a new study published in the latest edition of the journal Science, if current trends in habitat destruction and overfishing continue, the world's fish and seafood populations will collapse by 2048, resulting in less food for humans.

In an analysis of scientific data going back to the 1960s and historical records over a thousand years, the researchers found that marine biodiversity has declined dramatically, with 29 percent of species already in collapse.

Boris Worm, lead author of the study, tells Reuters in a statement, "Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are-beyond anything we suspected."

During a phone interview with Reuters, Worm said the decline in marine biodiversity is largely due to over-fishing and destruction of habitat, with the loss of biodiversity making ocean ecosystems less able to recover from the effects of global climate change, pollution and over-exploitation.

The scientists said marine-life reserves and no-fishing zones need to be set up to help depleted areas rebuild, with such measures proven effective in places including the Georges Bank off the U.S. Atlantic coast. [via Buzzflash]

That's a pretty sweeping statement, and definitely sets off my baloney detection alarm. I wish that progressive news sources would post the correct Apocalyptic headlines. What's happening is that species diversity in the oceans is collapsing due to overfishing, not that all life in the oceans will be eradicated.

Yet, anyway.

Here's the key figure of the Science article cited. The correct citation for this is :

Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services
Boris Worm, Edward B. Barbier, Nicola Beaumont, J. Emmett Duffy, Carl Folke, Benjamin S. Halpern, Jeremy B. C. Jackson, Heike K. Lotze, Fiorenza Micheli, Stephen R. Palumbi, Enric Sala,8 Kimberley A. Selkoe, John J. Stachowicz, Reg Watson
Science 3 November 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5800, pp. 787 - 790
DOI: 10.1126/science.1132294

... At the largest scales, we analyzed relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services using the global catch database from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other sources (15, 20). We extracted all data on fish and invertebrate catches from 1950 to 2003 within all 64 large marine ecosystems (LMEs) worldwide. LMEs are large (>150,000 km2) ocean regions reaching from estuaries and coastal areas to the seaward boundaries of continental shelves and the outer margins of the major current systems (21). They are characterized by distinct bathymetry, hydrography, productivity, and food webs. Collectively, these areas produced 83% of global fisheries yields over the past 50 years. Fish diversity data for each LME were derived independently from a comprehensive fish taxonomic database (22).

Globally, the rate of fisheries collapses, defined here as catches dropping below 10% of the recorded maximum (23), has been accelerating over time, with 29% of currently fished species considered collapsed in 2003 (Fig. 3A, diamonds). This accelerating trend is best described by a power relation (y = 0.0168x1.8992, r = 0.96, P < 0.0001), which predicts the percentage of currently collapsed taxa as a function of years elapsed since 1950. Cumulative collapses (including recovered species) amounted to 65% of recorded taxa (Fig. 3A, triangles; regression fit: y = 0.0227x2.0035, r = 0.96, P < 0.0001). The data further revealed that despite large increases in global fishing effort, cumulative yields across all species and LMEs had declined by 13% (or 10.6 million metric tons) since passing a maximum in 1994.


Fig. 3. Global loss of species from LMEs. (A) Trajectories of collapsed fish and invertebrate taxa over the past 50 years (diamonds, collapses by year; triangles, cumulative collapses). Data are shown for all (black), species-poor (<500 species, blue), and species-rich (>500 species, red) LMEs. Regression lines are best-fit power models corrected for temporal autocorrelation. (B) Map of all 64 LMEs, color-coded according to their total fish species richness. (C) Proportion of collapsed fish and invertebrate taxa, (D) average productivity of noncollapsed taxa (in percent of maximum catch), and (E) average recovery of catches (in percent of maximum catch) 15 years after a collapse in relation to LME total fish species richness. (F) Number of fished taxa as a function of total species richness. (G) Coefficient of variation in total catch and (H) total catch per year as a function of the number of fished taxa per LME.

Consistent with the results from estuaries and coastal seas (Fig. 2B), we observed that these collapses of LME fisheries occurred at a higher rate in species-poor ecosystems, as compared with species-rich ones (Fig. 3A). Fish diversity varied widely across LMEs, ranging from ~20 to 4000 species (Fig. 3B), and influenced fishery-related services in several ways. First, the proportion of collapsed fisheries decayed exponentially with increasing species richness (Fig. 3C). Furthermore, the average catches of non-collapsed fisheries were higher in species-rich systems (Fig. 3D). Diversity also seemed to increase robustness to overexploitation. Rates of recovery, here defined as any post-collapse increase above the 10% threshold, were positively correlated with fish diversity (Fig. 3E). This positive relationship between diversity and recovery became stronger with time after a collapse (5 years, r = 0.10; 10 years, r = 0.39; 15 years, r = 0.48). Higher taxonomic units (genus and family) produced very similar relationships as species richness in Fig. 3; typically, relationships became stronger with increased taxonomic aggregation. This may suggest that taxonomically related species play complementary functional roles in supporting fisheries productivity and recovery.

A mechanism that may explain enhanced recovery at high diversity is that fishers can switch more readily among target species, potentially providing overfished taxa with a chance to recover. Indeed, the number of fished taxa was a log-linear function of species richness (Fig. 3F). Fished taxa richness was negatively related to the variation in catch from year to year (Fig. 3G) and positively correlated with the total production of catch per year (Fig. 3H). This increased stability and productivity are likely due to the portfolio effect (24, 25), whereby a more diverse array of species provides a larger number of ecological functions and economic opportunities, leading to a more stable trajectory and better performance over time. This portfolio effect has independently been confirmed by economic studies of multispecies harvesting relationships in marine ecosystems (26, 27). Linear (or log-linear) relationships indicate steady increases in services up to the highest levels of biodiversity. This means that proportional species losses are predicted to have similar effects at low and high levels of native biodiversity...

...Our data highlight the societal consequences of an ongoing erosion of diversity that appears to be accelerating on a global scale (Fig. 3A). This trend is of serious concern because it projects the global collapse of all taxa currently fished by the mid–21st century (based on the extrapolation of regression in Fig. 3A to 100% in the year 2048). Our findings further suggest that the elimination of locally adapted populations and species not only impairs the ability of marine ecosystems to feed a growing human population but also sabotages their stability and recovery potential in a rapidly changing marine environment.

We recognize limitations in each of our data sources, particularly the inherent problem of inferring causality from correlation in the larger-scale studies. The strength of these results rests on the consistent agreement of theory, experiments, and observations across widely different scales and ecosystems. Our analysis may provide a wider context for the interpretation of local biodiversity experiments that produced diverging and controversial outcomes (1, 3, 24). It suggests that very general patterns emerge on progressively larger scales. High-diversity systems consistently provided more services with less variability, which has economic and policy implications. First, there is no dichotomy between biodiversity conservation and long-term economic development; they must be viewed as interdependent societal goals. Second, there was no evidence for redundancy at high levels of diversity; the improvement of services was continuous on a log-linear scale (Fig. 3). Third, the buffering impact of species diversity on the resistance and recovery of ecosystem services generates insurance value that must be incorporated into future economic valuations and management decisions. By restoring marine biodiversity through sustainable fisheries management, pollution control, maintenance of essential habitats, and the creation of marine reserves, we can invest in the productivity and reliability of the goods and services that the ocean provides to humanity. Our analyses suggest that business as usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations.

References
# 1. M. Loreau et al., Science 294, 804 (2001).
# 2. M. Palmer et al., Science 304, 1251 (2004).
# 3. D. U. Hooper et al., Ecol. Monogr. 75, 3 (2005).
# 4. I. E. Hendriks, C. M. Duarte, C. H. R. Heip, Science 312, 1715 (2006).
# 5. C. H. Peterson, J. Lubchenco, in Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, G. C. Daily, Ed. (Island Press, Washington, DC, 1997), pp. 177–194.
# 6. C. M. Holmlund, M. Hammer, Ecol. Econ. 29, 253 (1999).
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# 9. N. K. Dulvy, Y. Sadovy, J. D. Reynolds, Fish Fish. 4, 25 (2003).
# 10. H. K. Lotze et al., Science 312, 1806 (2006).
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# 13. B. Worm, M. Sandow, A. Oschlies, H. K. Lotze, R. A. Myers, Science 309, 1365 (2005).
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# 15. Details on methods and data sources are available as supporting material on Science Online.
# 16. A. R. Hughes, J. J. Stachowicz, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 8998 (2004).
# 17. T. B. H. Reusch, A. Ehlers, A. Hämmerli, B. Worm, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 2826 (2005).
# 18. R. Dame et al., Aquat. Ecol. 36, 51 (2002).
# 19. J. J. Stachowicz, R. B. Whitlatch, R. W. Osman, Science 286, 1577 (1999).
# 20. R. Watson, A. Kitchingman, A. Gelchu, D. Pauly, Fish Fish. 5, 168 (2004).
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# 22. R. Froese, D. Pauly, Eds., FishBase (www.fishbase.org, version 12/2004).
# 23. R. Froese, K. Kesner-Reyes, Impact of Fishing on the Abundance of Marine Species [ICES Council Meeting Report CM 12/L:12, International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2002].
# 24. D. Tilman, Ecology 80, 1455 (1999).
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# 28. C. M. Roberts, J. P. Hawkins, Fully-Protected Marine Reserves: A Guide (World Wildlife Fund, Washington, DC, 2000), pp. 241–246.
# 29. S. R. Palumbi, in Marine Community Ecology, M. D. Bertness, S. D. Gaines, M. E. Hay, Eds. (Sinauer, Sunderland, MA, 2001), pp. 510–530.

Overfishing won't destroy all life in the oceans, only most of the larger fish.

Some animals, like squid , that reproduce faster and exhibit complex aviodance behavior may do relatively better in the presence of global warming and an aggressive superpredator like the industrial fishing fleet on the open sea.

Which makes me draw some comparisons because superpredators don't handle environmental stresses famously well .

[I knew there was a reason why Darth Rumsfeld wanted to militarize space.]

If you wanted to post Apocalyptic headlines, there are other factors besides overfishing that might work better.

Acidifying the ocean is particularly detrimental to organisms that secrete shell material made of CaCO₃, such as coral reefs and a type of phytoplankton called coccolithophorids [Kleypas, J., R.W. Buddemeier, D. Archer, J.-P. Gattuso, C. Langdon, and B. Opdyke (1999) Geochemical consequences of increased atmospheric CO2 on coral reefs. Science 284: 118-120.]. The ocean pH change will persist for thousands of years. Because the fossil fuel CO₂ rise is faster than natural CO₂ increases in the past, the ocean will be acidified to a much greater extent than has occurred naturally in at least the past 800,000 years [Caldeira, K., and Wickett, M.E. Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH. Nature: 425, 365, 2003.]...

But it turns out this has a much greater effect than just on coral reefs. You see, corals are basically just a sessile form of the base of the oceanic food chain, plankton.

A nice recent more scientific short review of this is found here [Nature 442, 978-980 (31 August 2006) | doi:10.1038/442978a].



Lost protection: making sea water more acidic (centre and right) dissolves the outer casings of coccolithophores, tiny plankton that form the basis of food webs.

The loss of microscopic organisms ubiquitous in the oceans doesn't seem very alarming. After all they're very small. It's just they're the base of the food chain, for everything from salmon to krill to whales to the entire nation of Japan.

Oceanic life is like life everywhere: it's resilient, and if there are mass die-offs, it's likely adaptable species will expand to fill the ecological niches. After all, the world's been warm and full of CO₂before.

But as an aggressive superpredator, you have to realize your limitations, or meet the ends of aggressive superpredators throughout history.  ¶ 11:02 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Life as Data Points on an Algorithm

So many things to profile, so little time.

First, a catch from Avedon:

U.S. citizens to be required ''clearance'' to leave the United States

We've seen a long list of threats to our privacy and human rights recently. We think it all went downhill on October 17th. But this is just the latest move to become a 'secure' Totalitarian state.

If the U.S. government (a.k.a Bush Administration) gets its way, beginning on Jan. 14, 2007, we'll all be on no-fly lists, unless the government gives us permission to leave-or re-enter-the United States.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSA) has proposed that all airlines and cruise lines be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States.

"This proposed rule implements the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 requirement that such information be provided to the government before departure of the aircraft. This proposed rule provides air carriers a choice between transmitting complete manifests no later than 60-minutes prior to departure of the aircraft or transmitting manifest information on passengers as each passenger checks in for the flight, up to but no later than 15 minutes prior to departure."

Entire official federal document USCBP-2005-0003-0005

...Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are two countries in recent history that didn't allow their citizens to travel abroad without permission.

Next, this from DefenseTech:

Do you know your official terrorism score? U.S. Customs agents will with a new database system that uses algorithms to figure out which international travellers warrant closer search.

The system, announced in the Federal Register today, is called the Automated Targeting System, which will use the Treasury's watchlist, data provided to it by the airlines, your I-94 form and other data sources to compute your terrorism risk when you cross the border...

The data -- which includes all the information you give to an airline such as medical conditions, frequent flier number, special meal requests, home and email addresses, payment information and your travel agent's names -- will be held for up to 40 years. The data can be shared with any government agency or local law enforcement agency for civil or criminal matters, and can even be shared with foreign governments as data to test other data-mining programs, even ones not related to border security.

What happens if you have a name that's similar to a suspected terrorist or drug smuggler? Conceivably, you could have your car torn apart every time you drive to Canada or have a blue-gloved agent checking your anus for dope every time you go to Cancun.

But surely, you'll be able to remedy such mistakes using the Privacy Act, which prevents secret databases? Actually, no.

Finally, Xenophon makes another catch. Meet Tangram:

The new U.S. intelligence czar is developing a computer system capable of data-mining huge amounts of information about everyday events to discern patterns that look like terrorist planning. The Tangram document, a technical guide for contractors, says that researchers have already “developed novel algorithms and methods for linking entities and activities using a guilt-by-association model” also known as link analysis.

And of course, since all of these sophisticated algorithms are abosolutely objective in profiling terra'ists, they would never be abused for political gain. Or financial gain by an unscrupulous corporation or private contractor managing the system for the government. Of course not, not here in America.  ¶ 9:25 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Dick Hate: Rinse, Wash, Repeat

Dick Cheney Totally Hates You
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 3, 2006

That shirt you're wearing right now? Chances are, Dick Cheney hates it . That car you drive? Thinks it's for whiny un-American pansies. The fact that you've probably eaten tofu and wear designer shoes and have actually had sex while standing up? Pervert heathen traitor to the real America, Dick thinks. He hates that.

Some days, Dick has trouble counting all the ways in which he hates you, the world, life. Some days, he hates the fact that there are not enough hours in the day for him to count the ways in which he hates you and all you probably stand for. This makes him sad. Which he also hates.

It is a question often asked these days: Whence comes all this dark, dank feeling in America? Why does all seem tainted and soiled and lost lo these past years? When did simply being an American turn so dour and gray, like someone poured gasoline into a big glass of Sunny Delight? Here, I firmly believe, is a great portion of your answer.

It has become a national pastime, of sorts, listing all the things and all the events and all types of people -- liberals journalists prisoners suspects foreigners Democrats moderates animals environmentalists trees pacifists 'Nam vets women clean air -- Dick Cheney hates every single day. Even Republicans are a little taken aback by the length of the list.

Recently, this dark pall has become even more evident . Cheney's trademark hate spewed forth all over the media, like smoking black roof tar, when he appeared Fox News and claimed that the insane, increasing violence in Iraq between the Sunni and Shiite militias, the groups who are now killing each other and killing U.S. soldiers and causing havoc as a result of our failed invasion and failed puppet government and failed foreign policy, these vicious militias are killing even more right now because, well, because they read DailyKos.com.

And also, Truthout. And the New York Times. And this very newspaper.

In other words, Dick Cheney believes these radicals read lots of American liberal media and therefore understand that our midterm elections are upon us and that almost every Republican warmongering jackal is on the ropes, and if they increase their attacks it will only make Republicans look even worse than they do all by themselves -- which is, of course, already bad enough.

This is what Dick actually said. Why is the Iraq war deteriorating so horribly? Because Republicans are suffering. And the terrorists have it in for the GOP because the GOP fights for freedom and love and soft warm puppies, and terrorists hate that mushy stuff! This is what Dick wants Fox viewers to believe -- despite how, of course, years of insane GOP warmongering have given the world's terrorists everything they could've ever dreamed.

It's true. The terrorists of the world, including Osama, would love nothing more than 20 more years of Dick 'n' Dubya , if only to encourage more global instability, to rile more foreign resentment against BushCo's increasingly self-righteous, insular, vicious United States.

In other words, the terrorists love Dick. He and Dub and the World's Worst Administration have made for the greatest recruitment campaign in terrorist history. And man, does Dick hate that.

Yes, Dick hates your understanding of these ideas, your automatic recoil at his idiotic statements. He hates the fact that you know, when he comes out in support of torture and the "no-brainer" dunking of prisoners, that he's merely kowtowing to the last remaining lowest-common-denominator voting bloc of the GOP, the gun-totin' kill-'em'-all flyover-state fundamentalists who are, in their way, little different than the Taliban.

He knows you know. It doesn't matter. Because he hates them, too. "Dumbass vermin," he doubtlessly muttered, just under his breath, as the Fox cameras clicked off. Then he just chuckled.

In fact, it is very easy to go so far as to say that Dick Cheney hates his own boss and president, George W. Bush. Can you not tell?

Oh sure, Dick enjoys how tractable and malleable George is, how easily Dick can get his own nasty agenda items across and how he is often considered the "real" president, the most influential and draconian VP of all time. That makes him feel good, despite how good feelings are complete BS and make him suspicious as hell, which he hates.

But deep down, Dick secretly hates the fact that George is such an easily manipulable dink . And if there's one thing Dick hates, it's dinks.

Now, you might say, I do not like all this talk of hate. You might say, I do not like the fact that you talk about the vice president as hating me, my life, everything I stand for, even the life force itself. It all sounds so very ... hateful.

This is understandable. It is not a comfortable feeling. It is not something in which anyone but Dick Cheney likes to wallow for very long. But it must be noted here, because perhaps more than any other single human in recent history, Dick Cheney has brought the emotion of hate into the forefront of our national consciousness. He has made it our top agenda item, our most defining characteristic, the thing which we let spread around us, like a cancer. Karl Rove might've been BushCo's master architect, but Cheney provided all the nails.

But now, the good news. If Dick's hate of all things life-giving and positive and peaceful has been, in fact, some sort of enormous cosmic test, the thing we had to survive most, perhaps even more than Dubya's embarrassing, inarticulate bumbling, then it appears we have succeeded. Or rather, we're beginning to. The GOP is down to its last stockpiles of bilious gunpowder. The homophobia and the fearmongering now seem transparent and childish. The desperation is palpable and acrid. The beast is slumping, slowly, meanly, angrily back to its cave.

What, then, happens to all that built-up hate? What of that feeling that has, for so long, festered in the American heart, planted there by Dick in the hopes that it would spread and tumesce and keep us bitter and knee-jerk and reactive and controllable for decades to come?

Well, perhaps now, with the crumbling of the pseudo-fascist GOP empire, is when a bizarre transmogrification can occur. Now is maybe when the switch can be flipped and the poles can reverse and the hate actually implodes in on itself, burning us all clean. Or, you know, a little less dirty, which, at this point, is a damn good start.

In other words, maybe now is when we can once again begin to embrace those things, those ideas and those candidates and those clothes and those sexual positions and those nuances and those shoes and those books and those institutions that lie in direct opposition to Dick Hate.

It is, after all, a simple law of the universe: The more you love the vibrant and defiant and independent-minded gobs of this life, the more those things that are not those things will simper and shiver and wail.

See? It's already happening. Look closer at that Fox footage. Dick looks lost . He looks deadened. He looks, well, more than a little desperate. And man, Dick really hates that.

Which is, of course, a very good sign indeed.

Like leaving a long bitter winter, you can't argue with a change in the weather.

Still, it would be better than just "a very good sign if people would try to understand why the Cheneys and the Nixons of the world rise to power... and correct the problem.

...There are men who hold the keys
to set everybody free
but they are lonely ones.
And if the day should come
when they all can work as one
there'll be a destiny...
-Dave Mason, It's Like You Never Left  ¶ 7:02 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Lack of Truth and Consequences

Via Avedon:

America's Point of No Return
By Robert Parry
November 2, 2006
...In many ways, Election 2006 not only marks the last chance to exact some accountability from those responsible for the disastrous Iraq War and other failures, but it also represents a point of no return for a nation hurtling toward a future of endless warfare abroad and a new-age totalitarianism at home.

Indeed, one could argue that the trivialization of this important U.S. election – with major U.S. news outlets devoting two days of breathless coverage to Senator Kerry’s clunky joke – is confirmation of America’s rapid descent into a dark fantasy world incapable of separating meaningful fact from silly irrelevancies.

More than 2,800 American soldiers are dead along with possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in what is likely just a small down-payment in blood for President Bush’s Iraq War – yet the U.S. press corps is obsessed with Kerry’s supposed affront to the troops, though the joke seemed actually to be aimed at Bush and the former Democratic presidential nominee isn’t even on the ballot.

All that’s left now is for the Washington pundits – many of the same people who climbed aboard the Iraq War bandwagon in 2002-03 – to explain to the nation on Election Night how Bush and his political team brilliantly engineered a dramatic come-from-behind win or how the Kerry gaffe and the overconfident Democrats blew it.

But the recent goofiness aside, the stakes for the Nov. 7 congressional elections remain extremely high and are likely to get even higher.

The elections have become a referendum on whether the United States will wage a virtually endless “World War III” against Muslim radicals – a kind of global version of Iraq – and whether the U.S. Constitution will be effectively repealed, replaced by a new system without “unalienable rights” for citizens and with an all-powerful President.

If Bush follows the pattern of 2002 and 2004, he will interpret a Republican victory on Nov. 7 as a mandate for pursuing and expanding his policies...

Certainly. And let's not get mired in technicalities like elections. If there isn't a Republican majority in Congress after the dust settles, look for a search to invalidate the electoral results.

Venezuelan voting machines. Terra'ists stealing the elections. Dogs and cats, living together in unChristian bliss. Iranian attacks on the institution of marriage. Already, they're lawyering up.

If they can't win it at the ballot box, or simply Diebold it, they'll try to figure a way to send it to the $upreme Court.

When that doesn't work? Billmon points to Crawford's List:



Some Democrats get bought at bargain prices compared to the going rate for a Republican Congressperson.  ¶ 10:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  DisIntellipedia

John Negroponte's establishing the Spook Party Line.

According to Wired:

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage.

The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the world wide web.

A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for "secret" and "sensitive but unclassified" material.

The system is also available to the Transportation Security Administration and national laboratories.

Intellipedia is currently being used to assemble a major intelligence report, known as a national intelligence estimate, on Nigeria as well as the State Department's annual country reports on terrorism, officials said.

Some day it may also be the path intelligence officials take to produce the president's daily intelligence briefing.

But the system, which makes data available to thousands of users who would not see it otherwise, has also stirred qualms about potential security lapses following the recent media leak of a national intelligence estimate that caused a political uproar by identifying Iraq as a contributor to the growth of global terrorism.

"We're taking a risk," acknowledged Michael Wertheimer, the intelligence community's chief technical officer. "There's a risk it's going to show up in the media, that it'll be leaked."

Intelligence officials say the format is perfect for sharing information between agencies, a centerpiece of the reform legislation that established Negroponte's office as national intelligence director after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

They also said it could lead to more accurate intelligence reports because the system allows a wider range of officials to scrutinize material and keeps a complete, permanent record of individual contributions, including dissenting points of view.

That might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials are so enthusiastic about Intellipedia that they plan to provide access to Britain, Canada and Australia.

Even China could be granted access to help produce an unclassified intelligence estimate on the worldwide threat posed by infectious diseases.

"We'd hope to get down to the doctor in Shanghai who may have a useful contribution on avian flu," senior intelligence analyst Fred Hassani said.

In other words, let's put all professionals into the database with assigned security clearance levels. It helps keeps tabs on what they're thinking.

More here.

That's really Poindexteresque, Black Spot. An Intelligence/ propaganda database, shelled for various levels of clearance, probably all the way down to Negroponte/ Rumsfeld/ Sauron/ Morgoth, disseminating different disinformation packets for discrete user levels. And keeping tabs on the users, too.  ¶ 8:09 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Cutting and Running

...Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.

Now Bechtel is leaving.

The San Francisco engineering company's last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company's job is done.

Bechtel's contracts were part of an enormous U.S. effort to put Iraq back on its feet after decades of wars and sanctions. That rebuilding campaign, once touted as the Marshall Plan of modern times, was supposed to win the hearts of skeptical Iraqis by giving them clean water, dependable power, telephones that worked and modern sanitation. President Bush said he wanted the country's infrastructure to be the very best in the Middle East.

But Bechtel -- which charged into Iraq with American "can-do" fervor -- found it tough to keep its engineers and workers alive, much less make progress in piecing Iraq back together.

"Did Iraq come out the way you hoped it would?" asked Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's president for infrastructure work. "I would say, emphatically, no. And it's heartbreaking."

The violence that has gripped Iraq drove up costs and hamstrung the engineers who poured into the country after the U.S.-led invasion.

Bechtel's first reconstruction contract, awarded shortly after Saddam Hussein's overthrow in April 2003, assured the company that it would have a safe environment for its workers. But, by the end, dozens of Bechtel's employees and subcontractors had been killed, some of them kidnapped, others marched out of their office and shot. Forty-nine others were wounded.

Bechtel responded by hiring more guards , driving armored cars and fortifying its camps . Those steps ate up money that otherwise would have brought electricity and clean water to Iraqis. Sure it would've. To the ones that worked for Bechtel. But for some odd reason, none did.

The size of Bechtel's contracts also shrank over time, as U.S. officials diverted money from reconstruction and toward security. Instead of the nearly $3 billion originally budgeted, Bechtel finally received about $2.3 billion, a figure that includes money the company spent on projects as well as its undisclosed profit.

Mumm directed Bechtel's work from a bare-bones trailer in Baghdad. He is proud of his people for finding ways to work despite the threat of imminent death. Of 99 projects that the U.S. government directed Bechtel to complete, the company finished 97, abandoning only two for security reasons, the company says.

But Mumm's pride is mixed with frustration. Many of those completed projects later fell victim to collapsing security, which made maintenance dangerous and, in some cases, resulting in damage to plants and equipment.

He once hoped the new Iraqi government would turn into a steady Bechtel client, bringing the company lucrative new contracts in a country where virtually every road, power plant and waterworks needs repair.

"Had Iraq been a calmer place while we were there, amazing things could have been done," he said... [thanks to Defense Tech for the link]

Indeed. The level of self-disinformation in those last two paragraphs makes the mind reel. Every road, power plant, and waterworks needs repair. The Shock. The Awe.

From CNN: ...NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The Bush administration launched a war on terror because of the alleged acts of Osama bin Laden. Ironically, one of the companies the administration has picked to rebuild Iraq after the latest phase of that war has ties to bin Laden's family, according to a published report.

Bechtel Corp., a private construction firm based in San Francisco, recently was awarded a State Department contract, potentially worth more than $600 million, to help rebuild Iraq's infrastructure after the recent U.S.-led war there.

The Bush administration pushed for that war, in part, because it said the regime of Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq, had ties to the al Qaeda terror network, headed by bin Laden, the group allegedly responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

According to an article in the May 5 issue of New Yorker magazine, several bin Laden family members -- part of a large, Saudi Arabian family that made a fortune in the construction business -- invested about $10 million in a private equity fund operated by former subsidiary of Bechtel before Sept. 11... [thanks to Infowars for the link]

Saudi Royalists loves them some secular Sunni meat, alright. What Al Qaeda couldn't do to Iraq, the Codpiece Crusader, did. And as soon as Junior fixes this $election, they'll have a go after them pesky Shia with all the depleted uranium the D.o'D. can throw at 'em, too.  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Board Dispute Intensified

Somebody in the Company really doesn't like the subsidiary Cheneyburton Corporation's mouthpiece:

The Great Divider
Published: November 2, 2006

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

Darth Rumsfeld better watch himself, or he'll be out of a job.  ¶ 8:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  As Safe as Agent Orange, and Around a Lot Longer

...and subject to even more He Said vs. She Said reporting.

...Scientists have pointed to health statistics in Iraq, where the weapons were used in the 1991 and 2003 wars.

A report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2001 said they posed only a small contamination risk.

But a senior UN scientist said research showing how depleted uranium could cause cancer was withheld.

The UK Ministry of Defence said that there was no evidence linking depleted uranium use to ill health.

Depleted uranium is extremely dense and hard, and is used for armour-piercing bullets or shells.

Fears over health implications led to a study by the WHO in 2001.

Dr Mike Repacholi, who oversaw work on the report, told Angus Stickler of BBC Radio Four's Today programme that depleted uranium was "basically safe".

"You would have to ingest a huge amount of depleted uranium dust to cause any adverse health effect," he said.

'Risk from particles'

But Dr Keith Baverstock, who worked on the project, said research conducted by the US Department of Defense suggested otherwise.

He described a process known as genotoxicity, which begins when depleted uranium dust is inhaled.

"The particles that dissolve pose a risk - part radioactive - and part from the chemical toxicity in the lung," he said.

Later, he said, the material enters the body and the blood stream, potentially affecting bone marrow, the lymphatic system and the kidneys.

The research was not included in the WHO report, and Dr Baverstock believes it was blocked.

Mr Repacholi said the findings were not collaborated by other reports and it was not WHO policy to publish "speculative" data. He denied any pressure was brought to bear.

But other senior scientists have pointed to worrying health statistics in Iraq, which show a rise in cancer and birth defects...

A good pre-War for Iraqi "Freedom" link on the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqis post Desert Storm is here. Another is here.

Suggestion of a high cancer rate among returning Iraqi vets are described here. With multiple tours of duty, the higher mortality rates among soldiers engaged in multiple tours, and the reluctance of VA officials to talk about depleted uranium health efects [it's "harmless" officially], it will be some time before clear data emerges.

...When DU (Uranium 238) decays, it transforms into two short-lived and "very hot" isotopes - Thorium 234 and Protactinium 234. As it transforms in the body, the DU particle is firing off faster and faster "bullets" into the DNA, Fulk said, or wherever it is lodged. Because uranium has a natural attraction to phosphorus, however, it is drawn to the phosphate in the DNA.

As the Uranium 238 decays, it releases alpha and beta particles with millions of electron volts. When a DU particle makes this transformation in the human body it releases "huge amounts of energy in the same location doing lots of damage very quickly," Fulk said.

Thorium 234 has a half-life of 24 days and emits a beta particle of .270 million electron volts as it transforms into Protactinium 234, which has a half-life of less than 7 hours. Protactinium then emits a beta particle of 2.19 million electron volts as it transforms into the more stable Uranium 234.

The chemical binding energy in the molecules of the human cell is less than 10 electron volts. One alpha particle from U-238 is over 4 million electron volts, which is like "nuking a cell."

Leuren Moret, a scientist who is opposed to the use of DU, compared it to sitting in front of a fire and putting a red-hot coal in your mouth. "The nuclear establishment wants us to believe that it is like sitting in front of the fire and warming the whole body evenly - and that no harm is done, but that is not the reality," she said.

"We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person," Moret said. "These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer," she said. "A new phenomenon..."

"The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse," Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, "Silent Genocide."

"DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one's genetic code," Koehler wrote. "The Pentagon's response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator."   ¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It's About Time

Welcome to reality, John Kerry. You can not play nice with the Rethuglicans:

Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how: I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy.

If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the President and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp -- rubber-stamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families.

My statement yesterday -- and the White House knows this full well -- was a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops.

The White House's attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe. It's a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything in America to raw politics. It's their willingness to distort, their willingness to mislead Americans, their willingness to exploit the troops, as they have so many times at backdrops, at so many speeches at which they have not told the American people the truth.

I'm not going to stand for it.

What our troops deserve is a winning strategy. And what they deserve is leadership that is up to the sacrifice that they're making.

Sadly, this is the best that this administration can do in a month when we have lost 100 young men and women who have given their lives for a failed policy.

Over half the names on the Vietnam wall were put there after our leaders knew that our policy was wrong. And it was wrong that leaders were quiet then, and I'm not going to be quiet now.

This is a textbook Republican campaign strategy: Try to change the topic; try to make someone else the issue; try to make something else said the issue, not the policy, not their responsibility.

Well, everybody knows it's not working this time, and I'm not going to stand around and let it work. If anyone thinks that a veteran, someone like me, who's been fighting my entire career to provide for veterans, to fight for their benefits, to help honor what their service is, if anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq and not the president and his people who put them there, they're crazy.

It's just wrong. This is a classic GOP textbook Republican campaign tactic.

No joke. But this time, it looks like he's really not going to take it. Read it all, it's certainly worth it.  ¶ 5:16 PM 0 comments links to this post