Via firedoglake, Greenwald does a good breakdown of Al Gore's NSA speech. Glenn Greenwald says:
(1) It is past time for Democrats to dispense with the tepid, half-hearted, non-committal language when talking to Americans about why this scandal is so serious...
"...At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
"Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?"
Win a war? But I digress. Glenn Greenwald says:
(2) For reasons I explained in this post today, the NSA scandal is not a partisan or ideological scandal and must not be depicted that way. There is nothing in either liberal or conservative ideology which remotely promotes or endorses the notion that the President has the right to break the law. This scandal transcends the standard liberal-conservative battles because it threatens the basic principles of our government...
Bush followers are not conservative; they are devoted solely to the aggrandizement and glorification of George Bush. It is more of a personality cult than it is a political ideology. There is a strong anti-government sentiment which still runs deep in traditional conservatives – that is why Bob Barr and so many other actual conservatives have spoken out, in many cases more aggressively than Democrats have, against Bush’s lawless eavesdropping...
Good thing, too. It'd about time conservatives put away the Kool-Aid. Followers of Dear Leader have a lot more in common with followers of Sun-Myung Moon than followers of an Abraham Lincoln or a Dwight Eisenhower.
(3) Gore called for several specific actions to be taken in response to this scandal – including the appointment of a Pat Fitzgerald-like Special Prosecutor and the holding of comprehensive and serious hearings (not the worthless show trial planned by the impotent Senate Judiciary Committee and the neutered Arlen Specter)...
The mudslinging's started at any rate.
Great smackdowns of Abu Gonzales here and here. Read the comments.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
Feed Forward Effects on the Greenhouse
The main$tream either ignores the facts about the environment or exaggerates them.
Whichever sells best.
Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Preliminary figures, exclusively obtained by The Independent on Sunday, show that levels of the gas - the main cause of climate change - have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further.
But a summit of the most polluting countries, convened by the Bush administration, last week refused to set targets for reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. Set up in competition to the Kyoto Protocol, the summit, held in Sydney and attended by Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea as well as the United States, instead pledged to develop cleaner technologies - which some experts believe will not arrive in time.
The climb in carbon dioxide content showed up in readings from the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken at the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The measurements have been taken regularly since 1958 in the 11,400ft peak's pristine conditions, 2,000 miles from the nearest landmass and protected by unusual climatic conditions from the pollution of Hawaii, two miles below.
Through most of the past half-century, levels of the gas rose by an average of 1.3 parts per million a year; in the late 1990s, this figure rose to 1.6 ppm, and again to 2ppm in 2002 and 2003. But unpublished figures for the first 10 months of this year show a rise of 2.2ppm.
Scientists believe this may be the first evidence that climate change is starting to produce itself, as rising temperatures so alter natural systems that the Earth itself releases more gas, driving the thermometer ever higher.
Note that's unpublished data.
Part of the problem is that the United States has removed these measurements from the .gov sites (in easily interpretable form) from after 2000.
You can find the raw data in the lay press from the BBC in tabular form through 2003.
Searching the scientific literature publications Science and Nature, I can't find published data on atmospheric carbon dioxide after 2000. Thank the Bu$hCo policy meisters for that. So, I take the liberty to publish the data here:
You can find the lab's original digital data through 2004 here with descriptive information and a link (.pdf). There's more global data here.
I can't see a precipitous rise yet but there's a steady increase over the years. The function looks linear about an average since 1960. This isn't good, but at least it's not an exponential increase. Yet.
In the internet we move from the Rethuglican stonewall to sheer hysteria about the environment. I'm more than happy to speculate, and there is a lot of data to support that we are in the midst of a warming world, but when people talk "Gaiea", all I can do is laugh at them. There's a lot of solid data to back us, and we have real corporate opponents who want to suppress it.
The last thing we need is someone trying to build a new age pseudo religious myth fighting on our side.
Because if we make people like Lovelock our spokesmen, we are going to lose.
Whichever sells best.
Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Preliminary figures, exclusively obtained by The Independent on Sunday, show that levels of the gas - the main cause of climate change - have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further.
But a summit of the most polluting countries, convened by the Bush administration, last week refused to set targets for reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. Set up in competition to the Kyoto Protocol, the summit, held in Sydney and attended by Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea as well as the United States, instead pledged to develop cleaner technologies - which some experts believe will not arrive in time.
The climb in carbon dioxide content showed up in readings from the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken at the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The measurements have been taken regularly since 1958 in the 11,400ft peak's pristine conditions, 2,000 miles from the nearest landmass and protected by unusual climatic conditions from the pollution of Hawaii, two miles below.
Through most of the past half-century, levels of the gas rose by an average of 1.3 parts per million a year; in the late 1990s, this figure rose to 1.6 ppm, and again to 2ppm in 2002 and 2003. But unpublished figures for the first 10 months of this year show a rise of 2.2ppm.
Scientists believe this may be the first evidence that climate change is starting to produce itself, as rising temperatures so alter natural systems that the Earth itself releases more gas, driving the thermometer ever higher.
Note that's unpublished data.
Part of the problem is that the United States has removed these measurements from the .gov sites (in easily interpretable form) from after 2000.
You can find the raw data in the lay press from the BBC in tabular form through 2003.
Searching the scientific literature publications Science and Nature, I can't find published data on atmospheric carbon dioxide after 2000. Thank the Bu$hCo policy meisters for that. So, I take the liberty to publish the data here:
You can find the lab's original digital data through 2004 here with descriptive information and a link (.pdf). There's more global data here.
I can't see a precipitous rise yet but there's a steady increase over the years. The function looks linear about an average since 1960. This isn't good, but at least it's not an exponential increase. Yet.
In the internet we move from the Rethuglican stonewall to sheer hysteria about the environment. I'm more than happy to speculate, and there is a lot of data to support that we are in the midst of a warming world, but when people talk "Gaiea", all I can do is laugh at them. There's a lot of solid data to back us, and we have real corporate opponents who want to suppress it.
The last thing we need is someone trying to build a new age pseudo religious myth fighting on our side.
Because if we make people like Lovelock our spokesmen, we are going to lose.
People Start to Notice: The War on Terror, Isn't
Choamsky, you'd expect:
...you can measure the number of terrorist attacks. Well, that's gone up sharply under the Bush administration, very sharply after the Iraq war. As expected -- it was anticipated by intelligence agencies that the Iraq war would increase the likelihood of terror. And the post-invasion estimates by the CIA, National Intelligence Council, and other intelligence agencies are exactly that. Yes, it increased terror. In fact, it even created something which never existed -- new training ground for terrorists, much more sophisticated than Afghanistan, where they were training professional terrorists to go out to their own countries. So, yeah, that's a way to deal with the War on Terror, namely, increase terror. And the obvious metric, the number of terrorist attacks, yeah, they've succeeded in increasing terror.
The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a "dirty bomb," a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that's pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They're increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats...
But that's just a professor from M.I.T.
Digby notices someone- and a paid analyst at that- was gauche enough to say it on CNN:
BLITZER: Should there be a change in attitude after 9/11?
BERGEN: I think the short answer is no. I mean, the nation has faced much more serious crises than 9/11.
We faced an existential crisis in the Cold War and with the Nazis; 9/11, obviously, was a very big deal, but I think we need to have some perspective.
We're not in a situation where our enemies can simply annihilate us as the Soviets could. Certainly, they can do us a lot of damage. But we have to, sort of, weigh that against the fact that we also want to live in a society where constitutional -- the Constitution is paid attention to.
You can bet Peter Bergen's contract is up for review now.
...you can measure the number of terrorist attacks. Well, that's gone up sharply under the Bush administration, very sharply after the Iraq war. As expected -- it was anticipated by intelligence agencies that the Iraq war would increase the likelihood of terror. And the post-invasion estimates by the CIA, National Intelligence Council, and other intelligence agencies are exactly that. Yes, it increased terror. In fact, it even created something which never existed -- new training ground for terrorists, much more sophisticated than Afghanistan, where they were training professional terrorists to go out to their own countries. So, yeah, that's a way to deal with the War on Terror, namely, increase terror. And the obvious metric, the number of terrorist attacks, yeah, they've succeeded in increasing terror.
The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a "dirty bomb," a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that's pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They're increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats...
But that's just a professor from M.I.T.
Digby notices someone- and a paid analyst at that- was gauche enough to say it on CNN:
BLITZER: Should there be a change in attitude after 9/11?
BERGEN: I think the short answer is no. I mean, the nation has faced much more serious crises than 9/11.
We faced an existential crisis in the Cold War and with the Nazis; 9/11, obviously, was a very big deal, but I think we need to have some perspective.
We're not in a situation where our enemies can simply annihilate us as the Soviets could. Certainly, they can do us a lot of damage. But we have to, sort of, weigh that against the fact that we also want to live in a society where constitutional -- the Constitution is paid attention to.
You can bet Peter Bergen's contract is up for review now.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
I get letters
I get asked
Just so I understand you...
Do the Iranians pose no threat to us or our allies if the have nukes?
Thanks *
It is a good, civil, and reasonable question. My reply?
No more than the Russians or the Chinese. Or the North Koreans.
We helped produce the conditions to bring the current Iranian president into power. Until recently, Iran was moving towards a secular government. We also, through Bechtel and Rumsfeld's Swiss proxy ABB, have helped them build their uranium mining and nuclear capabilities.
Iran with nukes is dangerous, but certainly no more so than the North Koreans.
We should not let ourselves get sucked into a war that benefits the Saudis again more than anyone else. Like war with Iraq, a war with Iran would benefit some multinational corporations. It would benefit Wahhabi jihad. But pre-emptive war with Iran under these circumstances would not benefit you or me, or the United States of America.
Pre-emptive war is a coward's way, won't settle anything, and will increase the tendency of other Powers to shoot first and ask questions later. Like torture, it violates international law. Like torture, it's supposed to do that, because many profit from the unrest. Pre-emptive war is for bullies, who are by definition cowards.
If Iran launches a nuke at us we can turn the whole country into a glowing mass of cinders. If it knows that, it won't do it. But if it thinks that once it has nukes, we will be as cowed as we are with North Korea, it will only work harder to obtain them.
Just so I understand you...
Do the Iranians pose no threat to us or our allies if the have nukes?
Thanks *
It is a good, civil, and reasonable question. My reply?
No more than the Russians or the Chinese. Or the North Koreans.
We helped produce the conditions to bring the current Iranian president into power. Until recently, Iran was moving towards a secular government. We also, through Bechtel and Rumsfeld's Swiss proxy ABB, have helped them build their uranium mining and nuclear capabilities.
Iran with nukes is dangerous, but certainly no more so than the North Koreans.
We should not let ourselves get sucked into a war that benefits the Saudis again more than anyone else. Like war with Iraq, a war with Iran would benefit some multinational corporations. It would benefit Wahhabi jihad. But pre-emptive war with Iran under these circumstances would not benefit you or me, or the United States of America.
Pre-emptive war is a coward's way, won't settle anything, and will increase the tendency of other Powers to shoot first and ask questions later. Like torture, it violates international law. Like torture, it's supposed to do that, because many profit from the unrest. Pre-emptive war is for bullies, who are by definition cowards.
If Iran launches a nuke at us we can turn the whole country into a glowing mass of cinders. If it knows that, it won't do it. But if it thinks that once it has nukes, we will be as cowed as we are with North Korea, it will only work harder to obtain them.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
A Cold Civil War
This, then, is the reality: progressive bloggers and online activists -- positioned on the front lines of a cold civil war -- face a thankless and daunting task: battle the Bush administration and its legions of online and offline apologists, battle the so-called "liberal" media and its tireless weaving of pro-GOP narratives, battle the ineffectual Democratic leadership, and battle the demoralization and frustration that comes with a long, steep uphill struggle.
Ah, but we're not alone, and that is both a blessing and a peril in the current environment. This isn't just Democrats vs. Republicans or Liberal vs. Conservative anymore. It's Company vs. Company and inter Agency struggle, and that could get messy.
Why? Because the crime syndicate in power faces a number of problems that could make it act precipitately.
Not the least of which has been described by Tom Englehardt:
War with the Bureaucracy. Until quite recently, with an oppositionless Congress, increasingly right-wing courts, and a cowed media, traditional Constitutional checks and balances on administration claims of massive presidential powers and prerogatives have been missing in action. However, the founding fathers of this nation, who could not have imagined our present National Security State or the size of this imperial presidency, could have had no way of imagining the governmental bureaucracy that has grown up around these either. So how could they have dreamed that the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001 has been that very bureaucracy? Parts of it have been involved in a bitter, shadowy war with the administration for years now. It's been a take-no-prisoners affair, as Tomdispatch has recorded in the first two posts in its Fallen Legion series, focusing on the startling numbers of men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their governmental duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire, or simply be pushed off some cliff. This administration has done everything in its power to take control of the bureaucracy. As hurricane Katrina showed with a previously impressive federal agency, FEMA, Bush and his officials have put their pals ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"), often without particular qualifications other than loyalty to this President, into leading positions, while trying to curb or purge their opponents. At the CIA, for instance, just before the last election former Representative Porter Goss, a loyal political hack, was installed to purge and cleanse what had become an agency of leakers and bring it into line. Administration officials have, in fact, conducted little short of a war against leaks and leakers. To give but a single example, the origins of the Plame case lie in part in an attempt by top officials to administer punishment to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for revealing administration lies about an aspect of Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program. What those officials (as leakers, of course) did to his wife was clearly meant as a warning to others in the bureaucracy that coming forward would mean being whacked.
And yet, despite the carnage, as Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday (The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight), the New York Times reporters who finally broke the NSA story did so based not on one or two sources but on "nearly a dozen current and former officials." Doug Ireland laid out at his blog recently how, despite fears of possible prosecution -- the first thing the President did in the wake of these revelations was to denounce the "shameful act" of leaking and the Justice Department almost immediately opened an investigation into who did it -- one of them, former NSA analyst Russell Tice, has gone very public with his discontent. He has already been on Democracy Now! and ABC's Nightline, saying that "he is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists." He claims that the NSA spied on "millions" of Americans, including, it was revealed recently, a Baltimore peace group.
The war with the bureaucracy and even, to some extent, with the military -- high-level officers, for instance, clearly leaked crucial information to Rep. Murtha before his withdrawal news conference -- will certainly continue this year, probably at an elevated level. The CIA has been a sieve; the NSA clearly will be; at the first sign of pressure, expect the same from career people in the Justice Department; and an unhappy military has already been passing out administration-unfriendly Iraq info left and right. Administration punitive acts only drive this process forward. Any signs of further administration weakness will do the same.
The "warriors" in the bureaucracy will, in turn, fuel further media and congressional criticism. Congress, worried about next year's election, is an exceedingly fragile pillar of support for the President. Conservatives, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, are alienated or worse; certain Republican senators are angry over the way the administration is sidelining Congress. Even some right-wing judges have been acting out. And, of course, there's the possibility that, in some chain-reaction-like fashion, the dike will simply burst and we will catch sight of something closer to the fullness of Bush administration illegality -- sure to be far beyond anything we now imagine.
At which point look for this most reactionary of regimes to precipitate something unprecedented, too.
Ah, but we're not alone, and that is both a blessing and a peril in the current environment. This isn't just Democrats vs. Republicans or Liberal vs. Conservative anymore. It's Company vs. Company and inter Agency struggle, and that could get messy.
Why? Because the crime syndicate in power faces a number of problems that could make it act precipitately.
Not the least of which has been described by Tom Englehardt:
War with the Bureaucracy. Until quite recently, with an oppositionless Congress, increasingly right-wing courts, and a cowed media, traditional Constitutional checks and balances on administration claims of massive presidential powers and prerogatives have been missing in action. However, the founding fathers of this nation, who could not have imagined our present National Security State or the size of this imperial presidency, could have had no way of imagining the governmental bureaucracy that has grown up around these either. So how could they have dreamed that the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001 has been that very bureaucracy? Parts of it have been involved in a bitter, shadowy war with the administration for years now. It's been a take-no-prisoners affair, as Tomdispatch has recorded in the first two posts in its Fallen Legion series, focusing on the startling numbers of men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their governmental duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, retire, or simply be pushed off some cliff. This administration has done everything in its power to take control of the bureaucracy. As hurricane Katrina showed with a previously impressive federal agency, FEMA, Bush and his officials have put their pals ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"), often without particular qualifications other than loyalty to this President, into leading positions, while trying to curb or purge their opponents. At the CIA, for instance, just before the last election former Representative Porter Goss, a loyal political hack, was installed to purge and cleanse what had become an agency of leakers and bring it into line. Administration officials have, in fact, conducted little short of a war against leaks and leakers. To give but a single example, the origins of the Plame case lie in part in an attempt by top officials to administer punishment to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for revealing administration lies about an aspect of Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction program. What those officials (as leakers, of course) did to his wife was clearly meant as a warning to others in the bureaucracy that coming forward would mean being whacked.
And yet, despite the carnage, as Frank Rich pointed out last Sunday (The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight), the New York Times reporters who finally broke the NSA story did so based not on one or two sources but on "nearly a dozen current and former officials." Doug Ireland laid out at his blog recently how, despite fears of possible prosecution -- the first thing the President did in the wake of these revelations was to denounce the "shameful act" of leaking and the Justice Department almost immediately opened an investigation into who did it -- one of them, former NSA analyst Russell Tice, has gone very public with his discontent. He has already been on Democracy Now! and ABC's Nightline, saying that "he is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists." He claims that the NSA spied on "millions" of Americans, including, it was revealed recently, a Baltimore peace group.
The war with the bureaucracy and even, to some extent, with the military -- high-level officers, for instance, clearly leaked crucial information to Rep. Murtha before his withdrawal news conference -- will certainly continue this year, probably at an elevated level. The CIA has been a sieve; the NSA clearly will be; at the first sign of pressure, expect the same from career people in the Justice Department; and an unhappy military has already been passing out administration-unfriendly Iraq info left and right. Administration punitive acts only drive this process forward. Any signs of further administration weakness will do the same.
The "warriors" in the bureaucracy will, in turn, fuel further media and congressional criticism. Congress, worried about next year's election, is an exceedingly fragile pillar of support for the President. Conservatives, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, are alienated or worse; certain Republican senators are angry over the way the administration is sidelining Congress. Even some right-wing judges have been acting out. And, of course, there's the possibility that, in some chain-reaction-like fashion, the dike will simply burst and we will catch sight of something closer to the fullness of Bush administration illegality -- sure to be far beyond anything we now imagine.
At which point look for this most reactionary of regimes to precipitate something unprecedented, too.
Friday, January 13, 2006
No Cylon Fighter Aircraft Just Yet...
From Defense Tech
Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems -- the shared Air Force and Navy program to develop a killer drone -- has been cancelled, Inside Defense is reporting. "Instead, the Defense Department will begin work this year on a next-generation long-range strike aircraft, accelerating its bomber modernization plans by nearly two decades in an effort to quickly enhance the Air Force’s effectiveness across the Asia-Pacific region."
J-UCAS was supposed to produce an armed drone that could knock out enemy air defenses, conduct surveillance, jam enemy radars. On the side, it might do some strike missions. But it would mainly pave the way for manned aircraft.
This new project would focus more directly on taking the enemy out, Inside Defense says.
"The action to accelerate work on a new bomber tracks closely with a recommendation last fall for a new, long-range strike aircraft program made by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s director of net assessment, who called for developing capabilities necessary to deter China."...
You know how Darth Rumsfeld loves him some Chinese take-out.
If they just want to throw money at Lockheed-Martin, they shouldn't give an excuse like that.
Somebody might get hurt.
Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems -- the shared Air Force and Navy program to develop a killer drone -- has been cancelled, Inside Defense is reporting. "Instead, the Defense Department will begin work this year on a next-generation long-range strike aircraft, accelerating its bomber modernization plans by nearly two decades in an effort to quickly enhance the Air Force’s effectiveness across the Asia-Pacific region."
J-UCAS was supposed to produce an armed drone that could knock out enemy air defenses, conduct surveillance, jam enemy radars. On the side, it might do some strike missions. But it would mainly pave the way for manned aircraft.
This new project would focus more directly on taking the enemy out, Inside Defense says.
"The action to accelerate work on a new bomber tracks closely with a recommendation last fall for a new, long-range strike aircraft program made by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s director of net assessment, who called for developing capabilities necessary to deter China."...
You know how Darth Rumsfeld loves him some Chinese take-out.
If they just want to throw money at Lockheed-Martin, they shouldn't give an excuse like that.
Somebody might get hurt.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Who Needs Spies When There's Product Information?
Got yer top secret weaponry right here, courtesy of Northrop-Grumman, a friendly Carlyle Group affiliate determined to take your tax dollars, produce the latest defense technology, and sell it again to the highest bidder.
Step right up!
REDONDO BEACH, Calif., Jan. 5, 2006 -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been selected to develop "military-grade," solid-state laser technology that is expected to pave the way for the U.S. military to incorporate high-energy laser systems across all services, including ships, manned and unmanned aircraft, and ground vehicles...
Designed to accelerate solid-state laser technology for military uses, the JHPSSL program is funded by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala; Office of the Secretary of Defense - Joint Technology Office, Albuquerque; Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.; and the Office of Naval Research, Arlington, Va.
Under the current phase, the program's goal is for a laser system to reach 100 kW, setting the stage for a variety of force protection and strike missions such as shipboard defense against cruise missiles; wide-area, ground-based defense against rockets, artillery, and mortars; and precision strike missions for airborne platforms.
Earlier this year, the Northrop Grumman-led team surpassed a critical milestone on the JHPSSL 2 program when it demonstrated a laser system with a total power of greater than 27 kW with a run time of 350 seconds.
"We're anxious to move forward with scaling up to the 100 kW power level in Phase 3 of the program," noted Alexis Livanos, president of Northrop Grumman Space Technology. "With parallel funding for attendant laser weapon system technologies and demonstrations, systems using very high-power lasers could be deployed in as little as four to five years."
Northrop Grumman's approach utilizes amplifier chains assembled with multiple high-power gain modules. The company's JHPSSL demonstrator used two chains to demonstrate the 27 kW level achieved during Phase 2. Avoiding the need for new physics or scaling, the company's 100 kW architecture uses eight chains, very similar to those used in its 27 kW device.
Just in case you wanted to build one yourself but were having trouble figuring how to do it...
...JHPSSL Phase 1 addressed risk reduction of the technologies necessary to obtain high power and beam quality simultaneously. Phase 2 took these technologies and scaled them to greater than 25 kW, and showed further scalability to 100 kW and beyond.
Northrop Grumman Space Technology, based in Redondo Beach, Calif., has been developing and demonstrating high-energy lasers for more than 30 years. Space Technology develops a broad range of systems at the leading edge of space, defense and electronics technology. The sector creates products for U.S. military and civilian customers that contribute significantly to the nation's security and leadership in science and technology.
Step right up!
REDONDO BEACH, Calif., Jan. 5, 2006 -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been selected to develop "military-grade," solid-state laser technology that is expected to pave the way for the U.S. military to incorporate high-energy laser systems across all services, including ships, manned and unmanned aircraft, and ground vehicles...
Designed to accelerate solid-state laser technology for military uses, the JHPSSL program is funded by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala; Office of the Secretary of Defense - Joint Technology Office, Albuquerque; Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.; and the Office of Naval Research, Arlington, Va.
Under the current phase, the program's goal is for a laser system to reach 100 kW, setting the stage for a variety of force protection and strike missions such as shipboard defense against cruise missiles; wide-area, ground-based defense against rockets, artillery, and mortars; and precision strike missions for airborne platforms.
Earlier this year, the Northrop Grumman-led team surpassed a critical milestone on the JHPSSL 2 program when it demonstrated a laser system with a total power of greater than 27 kW with a run time of 350 seconds.
"We're anxious to move forward with scaling up to the 100 kW power level in Phase 3 of the program," noted Alexis Livanos, president of Northrop Grumman Space Technology. "With parallel funding for attendant laser weapon system technologies and demonstrations, systems using very high-power lasers could be deployed in as little as four to five years."
Northrop Grumman's approach utilizes amplifier chains assembled with multiple high-power gain modules. The company's JHPSSL demonstrator used two chains to demonstrate the 27 kW level achieved during Phase 2. Avoiding the need for new physics or scaling, the company's 100 kW architecture uses eight chains, very similar to those used in its 27 kW device.
Just in case you wanted to build one yourself but were having trouble figuring how to do it...
...JHPSSL Phase 1 addressed risk reduction of the technologies necessary to obtain high power and beam quality simultaneously. Phase 2 took these technologies and scaled them to greater than 25 kW, and showed further scalability to 100 kW and beyond.
Northrop Grumman Space Technology, based in Redondo Beach, Calif., has been developing and demonstrating high-energy lasers for more than 30 years. Space Technology develops a broad range of systems at the leading edge of space, defense and electronics technology. The sector creates products for U.S. military and civilian customers that contribute significantly to the nation's security and leadership in science and technology.
There's a Difference
How can Howard Dean get away with saying this (.wmv file), if native American Indian casino owners gave Democrats money?
Via Atrios via Oliver Willis's poster, Quaker in a Basement:
The Washington Times is still peddling crapola today:
"Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says that Democrats took no money from Jack Abramoff in the lobbying scandal, but a public-interest group official said yesterday that they did accept contributions from the lobbyist’s clients, who were trying to buy influence."
The same misdirection as before, insinuating that campaign contributions are the scandal.
*snippage*
"But Republican officials and a major public-integrity group counter his assertion with a growing list of Democrats have received contributions from American Indian tribes represented by Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud in connection with his lobbying activities."
In other words, “Abramoff stole money from the Indians, so if you got some, you must’ve stolen it too.”
"[B]oth Republicans and Democrats received contributions from Indian tribes that were represented at one time by Jack Abramoff,” said Lawrence Noble, executive director and general counsel for the Center for Responsive Politics.
“So the answer to Dean depends on how you define scandal,” Mr. Noble said. “I would say, broadly defined as a question of the tribes’ buying influence in Washington, it includes Democrats.”
Except nobody has yet accused the Indian tribes of being the problem here. They were the ones that got screwed over by Abramoff.
"The political news wire the Hotline has compiled a list of nearly three dozen Democrats who have received campaign contributions from Abramoff-related tribes. More than a dozen of them to date have refused to give back the money, saying that the contributions were legal."
“Abramoff-related tribes”?
Funny. He doesn’t look Native American.
Abramoff stole the money he gave to Republicans illegally from his native American casino-operating clients. If you own a casino, you can legally give money to whomever you wish. See, that's why the operative term is legally.
Casinos are scams. But it isn't illegal to own one. Nor is it illegal to donate to anybody openly within Federal guidelines. It's illegal to steal money and covertly give it to get favors.
...Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the President. From the same two clients he took to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated.
Abramoff’s White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes he and his partner Mike Scanlon ultimately billed $82 million for services tribal leaders now claim were never performed or were improperly performed. Together the six tribes would make $10 million in political contributions, at Abramoff’s direction, almost all of it to Republican campaigns of his choosing...
Since the Post’s Susan Schmidt broke the Jack Abramoff story, the media has focused on the stunning $82 million Abramoff and Scanlon billed six tribes for lobbying and public relations work. Far less attention has been paid to the political contributions, by Abramoff’s account $10 million, made by the six tribes. That piece of the story involves the K Street Project, which moves the money of corporate lobbyists and their clients into the accounts of Republican candidates, PACs, and issue advocacy groups.
...Abramoff advised tribal leaders that the contributions were the cost of doing business in Washington, where he could protect them from other tribes trying to open casinos to compete with those that already had them. He sent orders for the checks to be cut, designating each recipient. On March 6, 2002, for example, Coushatta Tribal Council Chair Lovelin Poncho followed Abramoff’s orders and disbursed $336,300 in tribal funds...
The Coushattas, a southwest Louisiana tribe of 837 members, operate a casino that does an estimated $300 million in annual business. The $32 million they paid Abramoff and Scanlon makes the tribe the largest victim of the fraud their lawyers now allege in a lawsuit filed by Texas plaintiff’s firm Provost Umphrey...
There's crime, and then there's victims. Sometimes the victims seem a little criminal. The biggest criminals make the exploitation cycle what it is.
Via Atrios via Oliver Willis's poster, Quaker in a Basement:
"Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says that Democrats took no money from Jack Abramoff in the lobbying scandal, but a public-interest group official said yesterday that they did accept contributions from the lobbyist’s clients, who were trying to buy influence."
The same misdirection as before, insinuating that campaign contributions are the scandal.
*snippage*
"But Republican officials and a major public-integrity group counter his assertion with a growing list of Democrats have received contributions from American Indian tribes represented by Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud in connection with his lobbying activities."
In other words, “Abramoff stole money from the Indians, so if you got some, you must’ve stolen it too.”
"[B]oth Republicans and Democrats received contributions from Indian tribes that were represented at one time by Jack Abramoff,” said Lawrence Noble, executive director and general counsel for the Center for Responsive Politics.
“So the answer to Dean depends on how you define scandal,” Mr. Noble said. “I would say, broadly defined as a question of the tribes’ buying influence in Washington, it includes Democrats.”
Except nobody has yet accused the Indian tribes of being the problem here. They were the ones that got screwed over by Abramoff.
"The political news wire the Hotline has compiled a list of nearly three dozen Democrats who have received campaign contributions from Abramoff-related tribes. More than a dozen of them to date have refused to give back the money, saying that the contributions were legal."
“Abramoff-related tribes”?
Funny. He doesn’t look Native American.
Abramoff stole the money he gave to Republicans illegally from his native American casino-operating clients. If you own a casino, you can legally give money to whomever you wish. See, that's why the operative term is legally.
Casinos are scams. But it isn't illegal to own one. Nor is it illegal to donate to anybody openly within Federal guidelines. It's illegal to steal money and covertly give it to get favors.
...Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the President. From the same two clients he took to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated.
Abramoff’s White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes he and his partner Mike Scanlon ultimately billed $82 million for services tribal leaders now claim were never performed or were improperly performed. Together the six tribes would make $10 million in political contributions, at Abramoff’s direction, almost all of it to Republican campaigns of his choosing...
Since the Post’s Susan Schmidt broke the Jack Abramoff story, the media has focused on the stunning $82 million Abramoff and Scanlon billed six tribes for lobbying and public relations work. Far less attention has been paid to the political contributions, by Abramoff’s account $10 million, made by the six tribes. That piece of the story involves the K Street Project, which moves the money of corporate lobbyists and their clients into the accounts of Republican candidates, PACs, and issue advocacy groups.
...Abramoff advised tribal leaders that the contributions were the cost of doing business in Washington, where he could protect them from other tribes trying to open casinos to compete with those that already had them. He sent orders for the checks to be cut, designating each recipient. On March 6, 2002, for example, Coushatta Tribal Council Chair Lovelin Poncho followed Abramoff’s orders and disbursed $336,300 in tribal funds...
The Coushattas, a southwest Louisiana tribe of 837 members, operate a casino that does an estimated $300 million in annual business. The $32 million they paid Abramoff and Scanlon makes the tribe the largest victim of the fraud their lawyers now allege in a lawsuit filed by Texas plaintiff’s firm Provost Umphrey...
There's crime, and then there's victims. Sometimes the victims seem a little criminal. The biggest criminals make the exploitation cycle what it is.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Spys Like U.S.
Rumsfeld's Secret Operations
-William M. Arkin
Tony Capaccio's Bloomberg story last week that the Pentagon is increasing the size of U.S. special operations forces by almost 25 percent is another sign of the unchecked growth of secret operations in the Bush administration.
According to a December 20 budget memorandum signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, 12,000 new positions will be added to Special Operations Command in the 2007-2011 five-year defense plan, augmenting an already expanded force of 51,000 Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and other commandos.
England calls for adding $7.4 billion to the five year SOCOM budget, a budget that has almost doubled since 9/11.
Donald Rumsfeld's "SOCization" of the U.S. military -- as some insiders call it -- is already responsible for short-sighted decisions that have led the current Iraq mess. What is more, the growth of secret and compartmented operations in the Defense Department -- not just special operations but also "information" operations and other intelligence organizations, goes forward without any real appraisal as to success or costs.
Welcome to the Rumsfeld doctrine of immediate victory. Far after the current Secretary of Defense is gone, America will be paying a price for these secret operations, and for the stiff arming of overt and conventional military missions at the altar of the "special." ...
Under the Rumsfeld doctrine of immediate victory, there is no question that the vanquishing of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the toppling of Saddam prevented another 9/11 at that moment. The use of light forces moving quickly scattered the enemy so that it could not organize and plan another spectacular attack on the United States, and so that it also could not breathe long enough to develop weapons of mass destruction.
That is the theory.
We all know what happened next, at least in the mid-term. In Afghanistan and Iraq, more and more conventional military forces have had to be brought in to repair the flaws associated with the doctrine of immediate victory. And though special operations continue to play a central role in those countries, terrorist networks have not only proliferated and grown, but they have also strengthened in parts of the world -- Pakistan, Syria, North Africa, Saudi Arabia -- where U.S. special operations, even clandestine special operations, have minimal effect...
The growth of special operations, like the growth of Pentagon domestic spying and warantless NSA surveillance, is another example of the propensity as well for the Bush administration to fight the war on terrorism through secret government. Whether one is for secrecy to protect American assets or not, without the light of day, we just can't know whether or not the pursuit is really most effective, how successful it has been, or how other alternatives would stack up.
We don't even know what the strategic military objectives are.
We do know what the strategeric objectives of this administration are.
-William M. Arkin
Tony Capaccio's Bloomberg story last week that the Pentagon is increasing the size of U.S. special operations forces by almost 25 percent is another sign of the unchecked growth of secret operations in the Bush administration.
According to a December 20 budget memorandum signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, 12,000 new positions will be added to Special Operations Command in the 2007-2011 five-year defense plan, augmenting an already expanded force of 51,000 Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and other commandos.
England calls for adding $7.4 billion to the five year SOCOM budget, a budget that has almost doubled since 9/11.
Donald Rumsfeld's "SOCization" of the U.S. military -- as some insiders call it -- is already responsible for short-sighted decisions that have led the current Iraq mess. What is more, the growth of secret and compartmented operations in the Defense Department -- not just special operations but also "information" operations and other intelligence organizations, goes forward without any real appraisal as to success or costs.
Welcome to the Rumsfeld doctrine of immediate victory. Far after the current Secretary of Defense is gone, America will be paying a price for these secret operations, and for the stiff arming of overt and conventional military missions at the altar of the "special." ...
Under the Rumsfeld doctrine of immediate victory, there is no question that the vanquishing of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the toppling of Saddam prevented another 9/11 at that moment. The use of light forces moving quickly scattered the enemy so that it could not organize and plan another spectacular attack on the United States, and so that it also could not breathe long enough to develop weapons of mass destruction.
That is the theory.
We all know what happened next, at least in the mid-term. In Afghanistan and Iraq, more and more conventional military forces have had to be brought in to repair the flaws associated with the doctrine of immediate victory. And though special operations continue to play a central role in those countries, terrorist networks have not only proliferated and grown, but they have also strengthened in parts of the world -- Pakistan, Syria, North Africa, Saudi Arabia -- where U.S. special operations, even clandestine special operations, have minimal effect...
The growth of special operations, like the growth of Pentagon domestic spying and warantless NSA surveillance, is another example of the propensity as well for the Bush administration to fight the war on terrorism through secret government. Whether one is for secrecy to protect American assets or not, without the light of day, we just can't know whether or not the pursuit is really most effective, how successful it has been, or how other alternatives would stack up.
We don't even know what the strategic military objectives are.
We do know what the strategeric objectives of this administration are.
More Treason: Saudi Bribes on the 9/11 Commission
From War and Piece:
It's a great comfort to know that Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham - of the bribery scandal - and Congressman Ken Calvert, both (R-CA), didn't see fit to bring Thomas Kontogiannis, a.k.a alleged co-conspirator #3 in the Cunningham plea agreement, along with them for their classified briefings in Saudi Arabia. Reports the North County Times today in a story on Kontogiannis:
And while Kontogiannis did participate in some of the meetings that he and Cunningham had with Saudi ministers, Calvert said that Kontogiannis "wasn't involved in any classified or high-level information as far as I can recall."
"If I had known his background, I wouldn't have felt very comfortable, but I didn't know," he said.
And isn't it wonderful to know that Cunningham, who has admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors working through companies affiliated with Kontogiannis, sat on the Joint Congressional Inquiry (.pdf) into the 9/11 Attacks? I mean, Cunningham could never have been bought off by Saudi interests, could he have?
Let's revisit Cunningham's remarks about Saudi Arabia that he placed into the Congressional Record on October 4, 2004:
The Government of Saudi Arabia has implemented a number of political and economic reforms to encourage political participation, promote economic growth, increase foreign investment and expand employment opportunities. The Kingdom has been updating and modernizing its academic curricula, and monitoring its religious schools. ...
It sure sounds like it was written by a Saudi PR firm. Not likely that Cunningham's staff wrote that -- it was a staff-free trip. Couldn't be, could it, that Cunningham was so indiscriminate in his bribetaking that he let Saudi interests influence his remarks, the way he let say $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors influence his defense appropriations recommendations?
And you know, it's not like anyone from San Diego such as former Rep. Cunningham and Rep. Calvert should be concerned about Saudi connections to the two Saudi 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego for several months before the attacks, right? Sponsored by members of the Saudi community in San Diego? Definitely nothing to look at here, I would think.
It is certain Dear Leader would say so.
It's a great comfort to know that Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham - of the bribery scandal - and Congressman Ken Calvert, both (R-CA), didn't see fit to bring Thomas Kontogiannis, a.k.a alleged co-conspirator #3 in the Cunningham plea agreement, along with them for their classified briefings in Saudi Arabia. Reports the North County Times today in a story on Kontogiannis:
And while Kontogiannis did participate in some of the meetings that he and Cunningham had with Saudi ministers, Calvert said that Kontogiannis "wasn't involved in any classified or high-level information as far as I can recall."
"If I had known his background, I wouldn't have felt very comfortable, but I didn't know," he said.
And isn't it wonderful to know that Cunningham, who has admitted to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors working through companies affiliated with Kontogiannis, sat on the Joint Congressional Inquiry (.pdf) into the 9/11 Attacks? I mean, Cunningham could never have been bought off by Saudi interests, could he have?
Let's revisit Cunningham's remarks about Saudi Arabia that he placed into the Congressional Record on October 4, 2004:
The Government of Saudi Arabia has implemented a number of political and economic reforms to encourage political participation, promote economic growth, increase foreign investment and expand employment opportunities. The Kingdom has been updating and modernizing its academic curricula, and monitoring its religious schools. ...
It sure sounds like it was written by a Saudi PR firm. Not likely that Cunningham's staff wrote that -- it was a staff-free trip. Couldn't be, could it, that Cunningham was so indiscriminate in his bribetaking that he let Saudi interests influence his remarks, the way he let say $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors influence his defense appropriations recommendations?
And you know, it's not like anyone from San Diego such as former Rep. Cunningham and Rep. Calvert should be concerned about Saudi connections to the two Saudi 9/11 hijackers who lived in San Diego for several months before the attacks, right? Sponsored by members of the Saudi community in San Diego? Definitely nothing to look at here, I would think.
It is certain Dear Leader would say so.
A Threat or a Promise? Voting Democrat is Treason to Dear Leader
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - President Bush issued a stark warning to Democrats on Tuesday about how to conduct the debate on Iraq as midterm elections approach, declaring that Americans know the difference between "honest critics" and those "who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people."
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here, Mr. Bush appeared to be trying to pre-empt a renewal of arguments about whether to begin a withdrawal immediately, as Representative John Murtha argued in November, or whether to keep a large presence in Iraq through the year.
Democrats themselves have been deeply divided on that issue, even while criticizing Mr. Bush's conduct of the war.
In some of his most combative language yet directed at his critics, Mr. Bush said Americans should insist on a debate "that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries." That follows a theme that Vice President Dick Cheney set last week, when he said critics of the administration's conduct of the war risked undercutting the effort to defeat the insurgency...
He added, "A country that divides into factions and dwells on old grievances cannot move forward and risks sliding back into tyranny."
Pot, meet kettle.
People in the progressive blogsphere have had the expected responses to this:
Seriously. If Bush is going to go on national TV and declare that the Democratic leader in the Senate (Harry Reid), the head of the Democratic Party (Howard Dean), and a lead Democratic Senator (Dick Durbin) are committing treason by "giving comfort to our adversaries" by criticizing Bush's disastrous handling of the Iraq war, then arrest all three of them and have them summarily shot without a trial and let's be done with it.
I'm serious. If our president is going to argue in favor of America embracing the ideals of a Soviet police state, if that's the reason hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives during WWII, if that's the reason 160,000 US soldiers are risking their lives in Iraq right now, all for the purpose of America touting the ideals of our worst enemies, some of the most repressive and hated dictatorships in the history of the world, then be enough of a man to admit it, do it, and be done with it.
Otherwise shut up and start acting like the commander in chief of the greatest democracy on earth rather than some sniveling coward who doesn't even known enough about his own country, let alone the world, to understand what it is we're really fighting for. (Thanks to mjs for the heads up)
Ah, but Bu$hie knows exactly what he's fighting for.
1) Oil.
2) A blank check for endless war.
3) A theocractic feudal government in America, with his family business as feudal lords.
Whenever he's making a noise, he's not just catapulting the propaganda.
He's waving a red flag at us, hoping we'll charge it, so he can sink more barbs into us.
Never underestimate what Dear Leader says as stupid, regardless of how demented he personally appears. He's a puppet for the cabal he represents. His actions fit into a plan.
A great example of this presents itself here (thanks for the link to Uncle $cam).
The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause..."
These Company people were just waiting for the right moment.
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here, Mr. Bush appeared to be trying to pre-empt a renewal of arguments about whether to begin a withdrawal immediately, as Representative John Murtha argued in November, or whether to keep a large presence in Iraq through the year.
Democrats themselves have been deeply divided on that issue, even while criticizing Mr. Bush's conduct of the war.
In some of his most combative language yet directed at his critics, Mr. Bush said Americans should insist on a debate "that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries." That follows a theme that Vice President Dick Cheney set last week, when he said critics of the administration's conduct of the war risked undercutting the effort to defeat the insurgency...
He added, "A country that divides into factions and dwells on old grievances cannot move forward and risks sliding back into tyranny."
Pot, meet kettle.
People in the progressive blogsphere have had the expected responses to this:
Seriously. If Bush is going to go on national TV and declare that the Democratic leader in the Senate (Harry Reid), the head of the Democratic Party (Howard Dean), and a lead Democratic Senator (Dick Durbin) are committing treason by "giving comfort to our adversaries" by criticizing Bush's disastrous handling of the Iraq war, then arrest all three of them and have them summarily shot without a trial and let's be done with it.
I'm serious. If our president is going to argue in favor of America embracing the ideals of a Soviet police state, if that's the reason hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives during WWII, if that's the reason 160,000 US soldiers are risking their lives in Iraq right now, all for the purpose of America touting the ideals of our worst enemies, some of the most repressive and hated dictatorships in the history of the world, then be enough of a man to admit it, do it, and be done with it.
Otherwise shut up and start acting like the commander in chief of the greatest democracy on earth rather than some sniveling coward who doesn't even known enough about his own country, let alone the world, to understand what it is we're really fighting for. (Thanks to mjs for the heads up)
Ah, but Bu$hie knows exactly what he's fighting for.
1) Oil.
2) A blank check for endless war.
3) A theocractic feudal government in America, with his family business as feudal lords.
Whenever he's making a noise, he's not just catapulting the propaganda.
He's waving a red flag at us, hoping we'll charge it, so he can sink more barbs into us.
Never underestimate what Dear Leader says as stupid, regardless of how demented he personally appears. He's a puppet for the cabal he represents. His actions fit into a plan.
A great example of this presents itself here (thanks for the link to Uncle $cam).
The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause..."
These Company people were just waiting for the right moment.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Flat Spacers & Space-Time Twisters
"I looked through this stuff ... completely crackpot, as far as I can see," theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss told me in an e-mail early today. He said he found the New Scientist report "irresponsible in the extreme ... they did not interview any real particle physicists, nor talk about the fact that the theory appears to have no real quantum field theory in it."
Case Western Reserve University's Krauss is familiar with the frontiers of physics — and science fiction — as the author of books ranging from "The Physics of Star Trek" to "Hiding in the Mirror," his recently published page-turner on extra dimensions in cosmology and popular culture. Another book by Krauss, "Quintessence," is even among the works cited in one of the papers by Austrian theorist Walter Dröscher and German physicist Jochem Häuser.
In that paper, Dröscher and Häuser suggest that the theory they set forth, based on decades of work by the late German physicist Burkhard Heim, could be tested in the high-energy setting of Sandia National Laboratory's Z Machine. And indeed, New Scientist quotes Sandia researcher Roger Lenard as saying he might be "interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment."
My efforts to contact Lenard on Friday were unsuccessful, but I know he's a guy willing to give more of a hearing to unorthodox ideas such as interstellar travel (and anti-Darwinism, but that's another story).
In any case, Sandia spokesman Neal Singer told me "it's unlikely that the Z Machine could play a part." Every high-energy "shot" from the federally funded Z Machine costs $100,000, and it might take 10 or 20 shots to build up enough data for an experiment, he said. Right now, it's not even clear how to design an experiment to test Heim quantum theory. "I don't think there's enough certainty to this" to justify the attention and expense, Singer said.
Lots of projects are competing for time on the Z Machine, with the top priority given to the federal government's nuclear-weapons simulations. Other Z Machine projects focus on inertial-confinement fusion energy and the physics of black holes and neutron stars. Thus, it's hard to imagine tests of Heim quantum theory moving to the front of the line.
It's more likely that findings from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, due to begin operation next year, could sort out the issues that Heim raised in particle physics. In fact, researchers hope that the LHC will help resolve a lot of the far-out ideas on the frontiers of physics...
Well, 2007's a little late but close enough to Titor's worldline for me.
Case Western Reserve University's Krauss is familiar with the frontiers of physics — and science fiction — as the author of books ranging from "The Physics of Star Trek" to "Hiding in the Mirror," his recently published page-turner on extra dimensions in cosmology and popular culture. Another book by Krauss, "Quintessence," is even among the works cited in one of the papers by Austrian theorist Walter Dröscher and German physicist Jochem Häuser.
In that paper, Dröscher and Häuser suggest that the theory they set forth, based on decades of work by the late German physicist Burkhard Heim, could be tested in the high-energy setting of Sandia National Laboratory's Z Machine. And indeed, New Scientist quotes Sandia researcher Roger Lenard as saying he might be "interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment."
My efforts to contact Lenard on Friday were unsuccessful, but I know he's a guy willing to give more of a hearing to unorthodox ideas such as interstellar travel (and anti-Darwinism, but that's another story).
In any case, Sandia spokesman Neal Singer told me "it's unlikely that the Z Machine could play a part." Every high-energy "shot" from the federally funded Z Machine costs $100,000, and it might take 10 or 20 shots to build up enough data for an experiment, he said. Right now, it's not even clear how to design an experiment to test Heim quantum theory. "I don't think there's enough certainty to this" to justify the attention and expense, Singer said.
Lots of projects are competing for time on the Z Machine, with the top priority given to the federal government's nuclear-weapons simulations. Other Z Machine projects focus on inertial-confinement fusion energy and the physics of black holes and neutron stars. Thus, it's hard to imagine tests of Heim quantum theory moving to the front of the line.
It's more likely that findings from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, due to begin operation next year, could sort out the issues that Heim raised in particle physics. In fact, researchers hope that the LHC will help resolve a lot of the far-out ideas on the frontiers of physics...
Well, 2007's a little late but close enough to Titor's worldline for me.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Smooth Operators
WASHINGTON - In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary.
But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.
Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.
“I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters,” Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. “That’s why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on,” he said. Goodman originally showed the letter to his own local newspaper, the Kansas-based Lawrence Journal-World.
“I was shocked and there was a certain degree of disbelief in the beginning,” Goodman said when he noticed the letter had been tampered with, adding that he felt his privacy had been invaded. “I think I must be under some kind of surveillance.”
Goodman is no stranger to mail snooping; as an officer during World War II he was responsible for reading all outgoing mail of the men in his command and censoring any passages that might provide clues as to his unit’s position. “But we didn’t do it as clumsily as they’ve done it, I can tell you that,” Goodman noted, with no small amount of irony in his voice. “Isn’t it funny that this doesn’t appear to be any kind of surreptitious effort here,” he said.
The letter comes from a retired Filipino history professor; Goodman declined to identify her. And although the Philippines is on the U.S. government’s radar screen as a potential spawning ground for Muslim-related terrorism, Goodman said his friend is a devout Catholic and not given to supporting such causes.
Doubtless a sleeper cell since 1955. You never know about those retired midwestern ivory tower types bearing old flames for 50 years...
But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.
Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.
“I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters,” Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. “That’s why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on,” he said. Goodman originally showed the letter to his own local newspaper, the Kansas-based Lawrence Journal-World.
“I was shocked and there was a certain degree of disbelief in the beginning,” Goodman said when he noticed the letter had been tampered with, adding that he felt his privacy had been invaded. “I think I must be under some kind of surveillance.”
Goodman is no stranger to mail snooping; as an officer during World War II he was responsible for reading all outgoing mail of the men in his command and censoring any passages that might provide clues as to his unit’s position. “But we didn’t do it as clumsily as they’ve done it, I can tell you that,” Goodman noted, with no small amount of irony in his voice. “Isn’t it funny that this doesn’t appear to be any kind of surreptitious effort here,” he said.
The letter comes from a retired Filipino history professor; Goodman declined to identify her. And although the Philippines is on the U.S. government’s radar screen as a potential spawning ground for Muslim-related terrorism, Goodman said his friend is a devout Catholic and not given to supporting such causes.
Doubtless a sleeper cell since 1955. You never know about those retired midwestern ivory tower types bearing old flames for 50 years...
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Caveat Juror
THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.
In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject's skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on "moving and non-cooperative subjects", the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the "galvanic skin response". "Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm," the website says.
Because these parameters are the same as those assessed by a polygraph lie detector, the DoD claims the RPA will also indicate the subject's psychological state: if they are agitated or stressed because they are lying, for example. So it will be used as a "remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation".
But finding ways to fulfil the DoD's brief will pose a practical challenge, says Robert Prance, an electrical engineer at the University of Sussex, UK, who specialises in non-invasive sensors. "They might capture breathing rate with an infrared laser that senses chest vibration, but how they will measure a pulse through clothes, for instance, is a very big question."
If the RPA is ever produced, it is likely to prove controversial. A remote lie detector would face even more difficulties than standard polygraph tests, which were themselves the subject of a damning 2003 report from the US National Academy of Sciences. "There is no way a polygraph test can be carried out usefully without the subject knowing, because you actually want the person to worry about certain questions," says Bruce Burgess, an examiner with polygraph firm Distress Services of Leatherhead, Surrey, UK.
But Steve Wright, a conflict analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, raises the prospect of people identified as suspects by the device being captured and subjected to secret "prisoner rendition" as a result. And he warns that the RPA could introduce a "chill factor" into everyday life.
The error rate and inadmissability into court of a technology like this is no big deal to the D.o'D.
Courts of Law, or for that matter, the Rule of Law being so, you know, 20th Century.
In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject's skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on "moving and non-cooperative subjects", the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the "galvanic skin response". "Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm," the website says.
Because these parameters are the same as those assessed by a polygraph lie detector, the DoD claims the RPA will also indicate the subject's psychological state: if they are agitated or stressed because they are lying, for example. So it will be used as a "remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation".
But finding ways to fulfil the DoD's brief will pose a practical challenge, says Robert Prance, an electrical engineer at the University of Sussex, UK, who specialises in non-invasive sensors. "They might capture breathing rate with an infrared laser that senses chest vibration, but how they will measure a pulse through clothes, for instance, is a very big question."
If the RPA is ever produced, it is likely to prove controversial. A remote lie detector would face even more difficulties than standard polygraph tests, which were themselves the subject of a damning 2003 report from the US National Academy of Sciences. "There is no way a polygraph test can be carried out usefully without the subject knowing, because you actually want the person to worry about certain questions," says Bruce Burgess, an examiner with polygraph firm Distress Services of Leatherhead, Surrey, UK.
But Steve Wright, a conflict analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, raises the prospect of people identified as suspects by the device being captured and subjected to secret "prisoner rendition" as a result. And he warns that the RPA could introduce a "chill factor" into everyday life.
The error rate and inadmissability into court of a technology like this is no big deal to the D.o'D.
Courts of Law, or for that matter, the Rule of Law being so, you know, 20th Century.
A Feint Behind a Smokescreen
Almost two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our government's extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only pray that the N.S.A. is not listening," the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.
Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.
Perhaps it's the obvious: the errant spying ensnared Americans talking to Americans, not just Americans talking to jihadists in Afghanistan. In a raw interview transcript posted on MSNBC's Web site last week - and quickly seized on by John Aravosis of AmericaBlog - the NBC News foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Risen if he knew whether the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour might have been wiretapped. (Mr. Risen said, "I hadn't heard that.") Surely a pro like Ms. Mitchell wasn't speculating idly. NBC News, which did not broadcast this exchange and later edited it out of the Web transcript, said Friday it was still pursuing the story.
If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American journalists and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, was a foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's déjà Watergate all over again. But even now we can see that there's another, simpler - and distinctly Bushian - motive at play here, hiding in plain sight.
That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures...
I like this idea. The Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton cabal dissembles out civil liberties in public, because there are so many other things going on they don't want you to easily notice.
It has always been a marker of Rove's handiwork: when attacked at one weak point they can hold, they press the battle somewhere else that will give them great advantage if they win.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.
Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.
Perhaps it's the obvious: the errant spying ensnared Americans talking to Americans, not just Americans talking to jihadists in Afghanistan. In a raw interview transcript posted on MSNBC's Web site last week - and quickly seized on by John Aravosis of AmericaBlog - the NBC News foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Risen if he knew whether the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour might have been wiretapped. (Mr. Risen said, "I hadn't heard that.") Surely a pro like Ms. Mitchell wasn't speculating idly. NBC News, which did not broadcast this exchange and later edited it out of the Web transcript, said Friday it was still pursuing the story.
If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American journalists and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, was a foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's déjà Watergate all over again. But even now we can see that there's another, simpler - and distinctly Bushian - motive at play here, hiding in plain sight.
That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures...
I like this idea. The Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton cabal dissembles out civil liberties in public, because there are so many other things going on they don't want you to easily notice.
It has always been a marker of Rove's handiwork: when attacked at one weak point they can hold, they press the battle somewhere else that will give them great advantage if they win.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
"A Warrior Pursues the Way of Knowledge, or the Way of Power"
That was Castenada's choice.
Clearly, Dr. Hofmann chose the Way of Knowledge.
Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.
"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.
Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."
"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."
He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.
Mr. Hofmann studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.
His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."
Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.
He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him...
LSD is a very minor component of most acid on the street. For one thing, people looking for simple mindless euphoria won't find it with LSD. So street acid is usually heavily laced with methamphetamine, so heavily laced that street "acid" is usually a mixture of methamphetamine, phencyclidine, 2-(2-chlorophenyl)-
2-(methylamino)-cyclohexanone (ketamine), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or tropane alkaloids with little or no LSD-25. Street acid can kill you and its formulation has little relation to the compound developed by Hofmann.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.
But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."
"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said...
Absolutely agreed here. LSD became a street drug intended to short circuit the VietNam antiwar movement shortly after the CIA finished its initial testing of the drug. It had precisely the opposite effect intended.
Its effects were so profound on so many it became absolutely outlawed, although the same system in the brain is today modulated pharmacologically in a milder way by drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax and the other more selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.
But why is LSD so terribly and profoundly different than, say, the opiates, or other hallucinogens? Why is it unlike tropanes which the military has settled on (unwisely) for wartime use? Why can't it be used like the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which are used to "control" depression and mood swings?
LSD is, by weight, one of the most potent drugs yet discovered. Both subjective reports and pharmacological methods such as receptor binding assays determine LSD to be, per mole, around 100 times more potent than psilocybin and psilocin and around 4000 times more potent than mescaline. Dosages of LSD are measured in micrograms (µg), or millionths of a gram. By comparison, dosages of almost all other drugs, both recreational and medical, are measured in milligrams, or thousandths of a gram.
The dosage level that will produce a threshold hallucinogenic effect in humans is generally considered to be 25 micrograms, with the drug's effects becoming markedly more evident at higher dosages. In the late 1990s, LSD obtained during drug law enforcement operations in the United States has usually ranged between 20 and 80 micrograms per dose. During the 1960s, dosages were commonly 300 micrograms or more. Dosages by frequent users can be as high as 1200 micrograms, although such a high dosage may precipitate unpleasant physical and psychological reactions.
Estimates for the lethal dosage (LD50) of LSD range from 200 micrograms per kilogram to more than 1000 micrograms per kilogram of human body-weight, though most sources report that there are no known human cases of such an overdose...
LSD affects an enormous number of receptors, including all dopamine receptor subtypes, all adrenoreceptor subtypes as well as many others. LSD binds to most serotonin receptor subtypes except for 5-HT3 and 5-HT4. The hallucinogenic effects of LSD are attributed to its partial agonist effects at 5-HT2A receptors. Exactly how this produces the drug's effects is unknown, but it is thought that it works by increasing excitation in cortical layers which facilitate the spread of information throughout the cortex. Through this, LSD causes parts of the brain which would not normally be activated by a given stimulus to become engaged...
LSD's psychological effects (colloquially called a "trip") vary greatly from person to person, from one trip to another, and even as time passes during a single trip. Widely different effects emerge based on set and setting — the 'set' being the general mindset of the user, and the 'setting' being the physical and social environment in which the drug's effects are experienced...
Generally beginning within thirty to ninety minutes after ingestion and continuing for the following six to twelve hours, the user may experience anything from subtle changes in perception to overwhelming cognitive shifts and vivid illusions.
Sensory shifts include "high-level" sensory distortions such as the perception of movement. Not infrequently, users report that the inanimate world appears "to come alive." While there is much subjective variation in what is meant by such words, it is commonly reported that static objects appear to be engaged in undulating movements that give the appearance of "breathing," as illustrated in this optical illusion.
Other common visual effects include appearance of moving geometrical patterns and textures on objects, blurred vision, image trailing, shape suggestibility, and color variations. Users often describe seeing new colors that they have not previously experienced, or colors may appear to have greater intensity. Perspective distortions may occur where items in the foreground appear to become part of the background, or the foreground and background may become temporarily indistinguishable. Changes in aural and visual perception are common, ranging from mild to overwhelming. LSD trips, however, are described to be only alterations of "reality" and not the loss of contact with "reality". Many people report that the boundaries between themselves and the physical world become permeable.
Higher doses often bring about shifts at a lower cognitive level - causing intense and fundamental distortions of sensory perception such as synaesthesia, the experience of additional spatial or temporal dimensions, and temporary dissociation...
LSD's primary effects normally last from 6 to 12 hours. It is typical for users of LSD to be unable to sleep restfully (or at all, despite desperate attempts) until at least 12 hours have passed, and they do not feel completely "back to normal" until after getting one or two full nights of restful sleep, although they will exhibit no outward signs of impairment after the drug has worn off.
LSD has an extremely short half life in the body. Most of the drug's already minuscule dose is eliminated before the trip is even over, suggesting that LSD triggers some sort of neurochemical cascade rather than acting directly to produce its effects...
LSD is a mind altering drug that tends to change the world view of many. Strangely enough the effect it has on some simply reinforces feelings we've had about the world all along. Unlike most drugs of abuse, a user gets to the point where they judge they've had enough, often the point where administering more of the drug has only minor additional effects.
Sometimes the user walks away from substance abuse entirely at that point, regarding it as a childish waste of time and energy.
Finally, the drug has this effect on many, as it has with Dr. Hofmann:
When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.
A drug that promotes secular humanism.
No wonder they outlawed it.
Clearly, Dr. Hofmann chose the Way of Knowledge.
Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.
"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.
Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."
"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."
He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.
Mr. Hofmann studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.
His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."
Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.
He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him...
LSD is a very minor component of most acid on the street. For one thing, people looking for simple mindless euphoria won't find it with LSD. So street acid is usually heavily laced with methamphetamine, so heavily laced that street "acid" is usually a mixture of methamphetamine, phencyclidine, 2-(2-chlorophenyl)-
2-(methylamino)-cyclohexanone (ketamine), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or tropane alkaloids with little or no LSD-25. Street acid can kill you and its formulation has little relation to the compound developed by Hofmann.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.
But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."
"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said...
Absolutely agreed here. LSD became a street drug intended to short circuit the VietNam antiwar movement shortly after the CIA finished its initial testing of the drug. It had precisely the opposite effect intended.
Its effects were so profound on so many it became absolutely outlawed, although the same system in the brain is today modulated pharmacologically in a milder way by drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax and the other more selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.
But why is LSD so terribly and profoundly different than, say, the opiates, or other hallucinogens? Why is it unlike tropanes which the military has settled on (unwisely) for wartime use? Why can't it be used like the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, which are used to "control" depression and mood swings?
LSD is, by weight, one of the most potent drugs yet discovered. Both subjective reports and pharmacological methods such as receptor binding assays determine LSD to be, per mole, around 100 times more potent than psilocybin and psilocin and around 4000 times more potent than mescaline. Dosages of LSD are measured in micrograms (µg), or millionths of a gram. By comparison, dosages of almost all other drugs, both recreational and medical, are measured in milligrams, or thousandths of a gram.
The dosage level that will produce a threshold hallucinogenic effect in humans is generally considered to be 25 micrograms, with the drug's effects becoming markedly more evident at higher dosages. In the late 1990s, LSD obtained during drug law enforcement operations in the United States has usually ranged between 20 and 80 micrograms per dose. During the 1960s, dosages were commonly 300 micrograms or more. Dosages by frequent users can be as high as 1200 micrograms, although such a high dosage may precipitate unpleasant physical and psychological reactions.
Estimates for the lethal dosage (LD50) of LSD range from 200 micrograms per kilogram to more than 1000 micrograms per kilogram of human body-weight, though most sources report that there are no known human cases of such an overdose...
LSD affects an enormous number of receptors, including all dopamine receptor subtypes, all adrenoreceptor subtypes as well as many others. LSD binds to most serotonin receptor subtypes except for 5-HT3 and 5-HT4. The hallucinogenic effects of LSD are attributed to its partial agonist effects at 5-HT2A receptors. Exactly how this produces the drug's effects is unknown, but it is thought that it works by increasing excitation in cortical layers which facilitate the spread of information throughout the cortex. Through this, LSD causes parts of the brain which would not normally be activated by a given stimulus to become engaged...
LSD's psychological effects (colloquially called a "trip") vary greatly from person to person, from one trip to another, and even as time passes during a single trip. Widely different effects emerge based on set and setting — the 'set' being the general mindset of the user, and the 'setting' being the physical and social environment in which the drug's effects are experienced...
Generally beginning within thirty to ninety minutes after ingestion and continuing for the following six to twelve hours, the user may experience anything from subtle changes in perception to overwhelming cognitive shifts and vivid illusions.
Sensory shifts include "high-level" sensory distortions such as the perception of movement. Not infrequently, users report that the inanimate world appears "to come alive." While there is much subjective variation in what is meant by such words, it is commonly reported that static objects appear to be engaged in undulating movements that give the appearance of "breathing," as illustrated in this optical illusion.
Other common visual effects include appearance of moving geometrical patterns and textures on objects, blurred vision, image trailing, shape suggestibility, and color variations. Users often describe seeing new colors that they have not previously experienced, or colors may appear to have greater intensity. Perspective distortions may occur where items in the foreground appear to become part of the background, or the foreground and background may become temporarily indistinguishable. Changes in aural and visual perception are common, ranging from mild to overwhelming. LSD trips, however, are described to be only alterations of "reality" and not the loss of contact with "reality". Many people report that the boundaries between themselves and the physical world become permeable.
Higher doses often bring about shifts at a lower cognitive level - causing intense and fundamental distortions of sensory perception such as synaesthesia, the experience of additional spatial or temporal dimensions, and temporary dissociation...
LSD's primary effects normally last from 6 to 12 hours. It is typical for users of LSD to be unable to sleep restfully (or at all, despite desperate attempts) until at least 12 hours have passed, and they do not feel completely "back to normal" until after getting one or two full nights of restful sleep, although they will exhibit no outward signs of impairment after the drug has worn off.
LSD has an extremely short half life in the body. Most of the drug's already minuscule dose is eliminated before the trip is even over, suggesting that LSD triggers some sort of neurochemical cascade rather than acting directly to produce its effects...
LSD is a mind altering drug that tends to change the world view of many. Strangely enough the effect it has on some simply reinforces feelings we've had about the world all along. Unlike most drugs of abuse, a user gets to the point where they judge they've had enough, often the point where administering more of the drug has only minor additional effects.
Sometimes the user walks away from substance abuse entirely at that point, regarding it as a childish waste of time and energy.
Finally, the drug has this effect on many, as it has with Dr. Hofmann:
When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.
A drug that promotes secular humanism.
No wonder they outlawed it.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Big Time Dick's Right Hand Prick
Cheney's Cheney
By David Ignatius
Friday, January 6, 2006; Page A19
Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff. But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.
Addington, 48, is in many ways Cheney's Cheney. Like his boss, he has exercised immense power without leaving many fingerprints. He operates with a decorous, low-key manner, but colleagues say he can intimidate and sometimes bully opponents. Though working out of the relative obscurity of the vice president's office, he has been able to impose his will on Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials. His influence rests on two pillars: his unyielding conviction that the powers of the president cannot be abridged in wartime, and the total support he receives from Cheney.
Addington's relationship with Cheney developed during the 1980s, when the two learned the same hardball lessons about national security. Addington worked as an assistant general counsel at Bill Casey's no-holds-barred CIA from 1981 to '84, where a friend says he loved the culture of "go-go guys with a license to hunt." He got to know Cheney when he moved to Capitol Hill as a staffer for the House intelligence committee and later the Iran-contra committee. "David has seared in his mind the restrictive amendments tying the president's hand in funding the contras," remembers Bruce Fein, a Republican attorney who worked on the Iran-contra committee. Addington moved with Cheney to the Pentagon as his special assistant and later became Defense Department general counsel.
What drives Addington is a belief that the president's wartime powers are, essentially, unfettered, argues Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee who has attended highly classified briefings with him on detention and surveillance issues. "He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives. Those views have extremely dangerous implications." Harman's efforts to negotiate compromises with Addington on interrogation issues were rebuffed, she says, by his insistence that "it's dangerous to tie the president's hands in any way."
Friends and former colleagues describe Addington as a man who thrives on his invisibility. He lives in a modest house in Northern Virginia, takes the subway to work, and shuns the parties and perks of office. He usually has the same simple meal every day -- a bowl of gazpacho soup. Though born in Washington, he styles himself as a "rugged Montana man" in the image of his boss, and he has a photo in his office of Cheney shooting a gun.
Addington's role has been the hard man -- the ideological enforcer. Most mornings during the first term, he would join the staff meeting in the White House counsel's office -- and take potshots at anyone he regarded as insufficiently committed to the president's agenda. "It was very surprising if anyone took a position more conservative than David, and this was a very conservative office," recalls one former colleague. "He was the hardest of the hard-core."...
There's more to this pangyric to fascism designed to sway the weak minded. Strong with the Force, though, are liberal progressives. Read it and savor the doublethink.
David Addington, by the very characteristics described, is probably more careful, secretive, and far dirtier than Scooter.
David Addington will be the one to cry "Havoc" and let loose World War III to save Dear Leader- and I ain't talking Commander Codpiece- and his Cause.
By David Ignatius
Friday, January 6, 2006; Page A19
Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff. But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.
Addington, 48, is in many ways Cheney's Cheney. Like his boss, he has exercised immense power without leaving many fingerprints. He operates with a decorous, low-key manner, but colleagues say he can intimidate and sometimes bully opponents. Though working out of the relative obscurity of the vice president's office, he has been able to impose his will on Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials. His influence rests on two pillars: his unyielding conviction that the powers of the president cannot be abridged in wartime, and the total support he receives from Cheney.
Addington's relationship with Cheney developed during the 1980s, when the two learned the same hardball lessons about national security. Addington worked as an assistant general counsel at Bill Casey's no-holds-barred CIA from 1981 to '84, where a friend says he loved the culture of "go-go guys with a license to hunt." He got to know Cheney when he moved to Capitol Hill as a staffer for the House intelligence committee and later the Iran-contra committee. "David has seared in his mind the restrictive amendments tying the president's hand in funding the contras," remembers Bruce Fein, a Republican attorney who worked on the Iran-contra committee. Addington moved with Cheney to the Pentagon as his special assistant and later became Defense Department general counsel.
What drives Addington is a belief that the president's wartime powers are, essentially, unfettered, argues Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee who has attended highly classified briefings with him on detention and surveillance issues. "He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives. Those views have extremely dangerous implications." Harman's efforts to negotiate compromises with Addington on interrogation issues were rebuffed, she says, by his insistence that "it's dangerous to tie the president's hands in any way."
Friends and former colleagues describe Addington as a man who thrives on his invisibility. He lives in a modest house in Northern Virginia, takes the subway to work, and shuns the parties and perks of office. He usually has the same simple meal every day -- a bowl of gazpacho soup. Though born in Washington, he styles himself as a "rugged Montana man" in the image of his boss, and he has a photo in his office of Cheney shooting a gun.
Addington's role has been the hard man -- the ideological enforcer. Most mornings during the first term, he would join the staff meeting in the White House counsel's office -- and take potshots at anyone he regarded as insufficiently committed to the president's agenda. "It was very surprising if anyone took a position more conservative than David, and this was a very conservative office," recalls one former colleague. "He was the hardest of the hard-core."...
There's more to this pangyric to fascism designed to sway the weak minded. Strong with the Force, though, are liberal progressives. Read it and savor the doublethink.
David Addington, by the very characteristics described, is probably more careful, secretive, and far dirtier than Scooter.
David Addington will be the one to cry "Havoc" and let loose World War III to save Dear Leader- and I ain't talking Commander Codpiece- and his Cause.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
John Titor, Where or When Are You?
From Defense Tech, which ought to know better than to say something like this where us moonbats could hear it:
A controversial paper, outling a "motor [that] would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds" is making waves in military and scientific circles, New Scientist reports. "It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics."
The Scotsman notes that...
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft."
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that... "NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [US] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."
Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, "runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine" which might be able to test some of the basic science behind Hauser's theories, New Scientist observes.
For now, though, [Sandia space scientist Roger] Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment."
This sounds like a gravity polarizer, but trying to reach a hyperspace through the use of a gravity polarizer might be a Big Mistake.
This also reminds me of a certain hoax. At least, reality-based analyses makes me think it a hoax. There are times one wonders who's hoaxing whom.
Skipping into other dimensions to beat the local traffic laws doesn't guarantee this one will be in the same place when you get back.
But that's kind of what John Titor, Robert Heinlein, and Larry Niven have warned us about, isn't it?
A controversial paper, outling a "motor [that] would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds" is making waves in military and scientific circles, New Scientist reports. "It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics."
The Scotsman notes that...
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft."
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that... "NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [US] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."
Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, "runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine" which might be able to test some of the basic science behind Hauser's theories, New Scientist observes.
For now, though, [Sandia space scientist Roger] Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment."
This sounds like a gravity polarizer, but trying to reach a hyperspace through the use of a gravity polarizer might be a Big Mistake.
This also reminds me of a certain hoax. At least, reality-based analyses makes me think it a hoax. There are times one wonders who's hoaxing whom.
Skipping into other dimensions to beat the local traffic laws doesn't guarantee this one will be in the same place when you get back.
But that's kind of what John Titor, Robert Heinlein, and Larry Niven have warned us about, isn't it?
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Entrepreneur: Making Better Ways to See You With, My Dear
The new chief of the CIA's venture capital organization, In-Q-Tel, wants to make the fanciful spy gadgetry it develops through investments more broadly available to all U.S. intelligence agencies.
Amit Yoran, who resigned as the government's cybersecurity chief in 2004, is taking over as In-Q-Tel's chief executive after the surprise departure of longtime CEO Gilman Louie. Yoran had previously founded a technology startup, Riptech Inc., which Symantec Corp. purchased in 2002 for $145 million in cash.
Yoran, whose career has focused mostly on protecting computers from hackers, said he wants to expand In-Q-Tel to invest in companies whose technology will help not just the CIA, but all U.S. intelligence agencies.
Many of the tools are classified once they're adopted by the spy community, but among the hottest in demand: better tools to mine and analyze large amounts of data, ``sensing'' technologies and programs to find relationships among information where they aren't obvious, Yoran said.
``Technology is one of the biggest threats to our intelligence systems and one of the biggest opportunities,'' Yoran said...
How do you protect that which is run by those willing to sell to the highest bidder? You don't. You find something that sells, too.
That's probably why he quit.
He saw where the money is, and now he's making better tools for Total Information Awareness.
Amit Yoran, who resigned as the government's cybersecurity chief in 2004, is taking over as In-Q-Tel's chief executive after the surprise departure of longtime CEO Gilman Louie. Yoran had previously founded a technology startup, Riptech Inc., which Symantec Corp. purchased in 2002 for $145 million in cash.
Yoran, whose career has focused mostly on protecting computers from hackers, said he wants to expand In-Q-Tel to invest in companies whose technology will help not just the CIA, but all U.S. intelligence agencies.
Many of the tools are classified once they're adopted by the spy community, but among the hottest in demand: better tools to mine and analyze large amounts of data, ``sensing'' technologies and programs to find relationships among information where they aren't obvious, Yoran said.
``Technology is one of the biggest threats to our intelligence systems and one of the biggest opportunities,'' Yoran said...
How do you protect that which is run by those willing to sell to the highest bidder? You don't. You find something that sells, too.
That's probably why he quit.
He saw where the money is, and now he's making better tools for Total Information Awareness.
Lending Them Their Protection Money: A Family Business
...In December, the International Monetary Fund, in exchange for giving a loan of $685 million to the Iraqi government, insisted that the Iraqis lift subsidies on the price of oil and open the economy to more private investment.
As the IMF said in a press release of December 23, the Iraqi government must be committed to “controlling the wage and pensions bill, reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products.”
The impact of the IMF extortion was swift and brutal.
“Since the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, fuel prices have increased five-fold, mostly because the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari has cut subsidies as part of a debt-forgiveness deal it signed with the International Monetary Fund,” the Los Angeles Times reported on December 28.
“The move has shocked Iraqis long accustomed to hefty subsidies of gasoline, kerosene, cooking gas, and other fuels.”
Iraqis are getting a nasty taste of the IMF’s medicine. “Over the summer, gas was selling for about five cents a gallon,” the LA Times noted. “Now it’s about 65 cents, and at the end of the price increases, gasoline will cost about the same in Iraq as it does in other countries in the Persian Gulf, about $1 per gallon. The prices of kerosene, diesel, and cooking gas have seen similar or steeper increases.” The price of public transportation has also gone up significantly.
Not surprisingly, these enormous price hikes have led to riots around the country, with police firing on 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh, according to an account on Daily Kos,
Iraq’s oil minister quit to protest the government’s capitulation to the IMF. According to Daily Kos, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”
The indestructible Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, replaced al-Uloum.
The Bush Administration is four-square behind the IMF deal...
Cheneyburton likes to keep it all in the family. Why, after Wolfie left the D.o'D. for the IMF, he made sure his Saudi squeeze got taken care of. To avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, of course.
Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz's Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she'll be working with Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau...
Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn't happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.
In the world of political appointees, however, no one takes a back seat to Liz Cheney. She's now Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, and her bureau has taken over the issuance of the Weekly Status Report, which charts the Bush regime's "progress" in Iraq and is notable for its extreme fudging of statistics about how many Iraqi cops and soldiers are ready to take over their chaotic country. But Liz Cheney has been a player, by virtue of her daddy, for a few years now. He's simply returning the favor. As Slate's Timothy Noah pointed out last year, Dick Cheney probably owed his Vietnam War draft deferment to the birth of daughter Liz.
Now that she's fully grown, she's a key architect of our muddled foreign policies in the Middle East — or at least that's the job her name earned her. Keep reading, and I'll give you an example of her crucial role in the disastrous Iraq occupation.
Back in the summer of 2003, when it was already apparent that the Bush regime hadn't adequately planned for the aftermath of its unjustified invasion of Iraq, the Washington Post's Peter Slevin and Dana Priest wrote a piece called "Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors," tracing back that disastrous fumbling...
As the IMF said in a press release of December 23, the Iraqi government must be committed to “controlling the wage and pensions bill, reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products.”
The impact of the IMF extortion was swift and brutal.
“Since the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, fuel prices have increased five-fold, mostly because the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari has cut subsidies as part of a debt-forgiveness deal it signed with the International Monetary Fund,” the Los Angeles Times reported on December 28.
“The move has shocked Iraqis long accustomed to hefty subsidies of gasoline, kerosene, cooking gas, and other fuels.”
Iraqis are getting a nasty taste of the IMF’s medicine. “Over the summer, gas was selling for about five cents a gallon,” the LA Times noted. “Now it’s about 65 cents, and at the end of the price increases, gasoline will cost about the same in Iraq as it does in other countries in the Persian Gulf, about $1 per gallon. The prices of kerosene, diesel, and cooking gas have seen similar or steeper increases.” The price of public transportation has also gone up significantly.
Not surprisingly, these enormous price hikes have led to riots around the country, with police firing on 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh, according to an account on Daily Kos,
Iraq’s oil minister quit to protest the government’s capitulation to the IMF. According to Daily Kos, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”
The indestructible Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, replaced al-Uloum.
The Bush Administration is four-square behind the IMF deal...
Cheneyburton likes to keep it all in the family. Why, after Wolfie left the D.o'D. for the IMF, he made sure his Saudi squeeze got taken care of. To avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, of course.
Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz's Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she'll be working with Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau...
Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn't happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.
In the world of political appointees, however, no one takes a back seat to Liz Cheney. She's now Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, and her bureau has taken over the issuance of the Weekly Status Report, which charts the Bush regime's "progress" in Iraq and is notable for its extreme fudging of statistics about how many Iraqi cops and soldiers are ready to take over their chaotic country. But Liz Cheney has been a player, by virtue of her daddy, for a few years now. He's simply returning the favor. As Slate's Timothy Noah pointed out last year, Dick Cheney probably owed his Vietnam War draft deferment to the birth of daughter Liz.
Now that she's fully grown, she's a key architect of our muddled foreign policies in the Middle East — or at least that's the job her name earned her. Keep reading, and I'll give you an example of her crucial role in the disastrous Iraq occupation.
Back in the summer of 2003, when it was already apparent that the Bush regime hadn't adequately planned for the aftermath of its unjustified invasion of Iraq, the Washington Post's Peter Slevin and Dana Priest wrote a piece called "Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors," tracing back that disastrous fumbling...
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Domino Theory
This was the year the "war on terror" - an obnoxious expression which we all parroted after 11 September 2001 - appeared to be almost as endless as George Bush once claimed it would be. And unsuccessful. For, after all the bombing of Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq and its appallingly tragic aftermath, can anyone claim today that they feel safer than they did a year ago?
We have gone on smashing away at the human rights we trumpeted at the Russians - and the Arabs - during the Cold War. We have perhaps fatally weakened all those provisions that were written into our treaties and conventions in the aftermath of the Second World War to make the world a safer place. And we claim we are winning.
Where, for example, is the terror? In the streets of Baghdad, to be sure. And perhaps again in our glorious West if we go on with this folly. But terror is also in the prisons and torture chambers of the Middle East. It is in the very jails to which we have been merrily sending out trussed-up prisoners these past three years. For Jack Straw to claim that men are not being sent on their way to torture is surely one of the most extraordinary - perhaps absurd is closer to the mark - statements to have been made in the "war on terror". If they are not going to be tortured - like the luckless Canadian shipped off to Damascus from New York - then what is the purpose of sending them anywhere?
And how are we supposed to "win" this war by ignoring all the injustices we are inflicting on that part of the world from which the hijackers of September 11 originally came? How many times have Messrs Bush and Blair talked about "democracy"? How few times have they talked about "justice", the righting of historic wrongs, the ending of torture? Our principal victims of the "war on terror", of course, have been in Iraq (where we have done quite a bit of torturing ourselves).
But, strange to say, we are silent about the horrors the people of Iraq are now enduring. We do not even know - are not allowed to know - how many of them have died. We know that 1,100 Iraqis died by violence in Baghdad in July alone. That's terror.
But how many died in the other cities of Iraq, in Mosul and Kirkuk and Irbil, and in Amara and Fallujah and Ramadi and Najaf and Kerbala and Basra? Three thousand in July? Or four thousand? And if those projections are accurate, we are talking about 36,000 or 48,000 over the year - which makes that projected post-April 2003 figure of 100,000 dead, which Blair ridiculed, rather conservative, doesn't it?
It's not so long ago, I recall, that Bush explained to us that all the Arabs would one day wish to have the freedoms of Iraq. I cannot think of an Arab today who would wish to contemplate such ill fortune, not least because of the increasingly sectarian nature of the authorities, elected though they are...
-Robert Fisk
The Independent UK
Monday 02 January 2006
But Iraq is slowly receeding to the rear view mirror of those brash TheoCons in Washington, if not to the American soldiers stranded there as pawns of the chickenhawks.
Iran is looking better and better to the feverish minds in our Capitol. Dear Leader promised no option was off the table to Iran, and to prove it he did for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad what Osama bin Laden did for him: roused the base by insults on the eve of the election.
Ahmadinejad doubtless stole his presidential election like Bu$h did his- both of them.
Bu$hCo has a long track record of profiting from Iranian ire.
There have been illegal Halliburton deals in Iran as linked here and here.
There have been illegal Bechtel-Iran deals (and others) here and here.
Let's not forget Darth Rumsfeld's Swiss corporation, ABB, that loves it some Iranian nukes too.
Or Iran-Contra.
The problem with Endless War as economic and social policy is that sooner or later you encounter somebody who can end it for you.
We have gone on smashing away at the human rights we trumpeted at the Russians - and the Arabs - during the Cold War. We have perhaps fatally weakened all those provisions that were written into our treaties and conventions in the aftermath of the Second World War to make the world a safer place. And we claim we are winning.
Where, for example, is the terror? In the streets of Baghdad, to be sure. And perhaps again in our glorious West if we go on with this folly. But terror is also in the prisons and torture chambers of the Middle East. It is in the very jails to which we have been merrily sending out trussed-up prisoners these past three years. For Jack Straw to claim that men are not being sent on their way to torture is surely one of the most extraordinary - perhaps absurd is closer to the mark - statements to have been made in the "war on terror". If they are not going to be tortured - like the luckless Canadian shipped off to Damascus from New York - then what is the purpose of sending them anywhere?
And how are we supposed to "win" this war by ignoring all the injustices we are inflicting on that part of the world from which the hijackers of September 11 originally came? How many times have Messrs Bush and Blair talked about "democracy"? How few times have they talked about "justice", the righting of historic wrongs, the ending of torture? Our principal victims of the "war on terror", of course, have been in Iraq (where we have done quite a bit of torturing ourselves).
But, strange to say, we are silent about the horrors the people of Iraq are now enduring. We do not even know - are not allowed to know - how many of them have died. We know that 1,100 Iraqis died by violence in Baghdad in July alone. That's terror.
But how many died in the other cities of Iraq, in Mosul and Kirkuk and Irbil, and in Amara and Fallujah and Ramadi and Najaf and Kerbala and Basra? Three thousand in July? Or four thousand? And if those projections are accurate, we are talking about 36,000 or 48,000 over the year - which makes that projected post-April 2003 figure of 100,000 dead, which Blair ridiculed, rather conservative, doesn't it?
It's not so long ago, I recall, that Bush explained to us that all the Arabs would one day wish to have the freedoms of Iraq. I cannot think of an Arab today who would wish to contemplate such ill fortune, not least because of the increasingly sectarian nature of the authorities, elected though they are...
-Robert Fisk
The Independent UK
Monday 02 January 2006
But Iraq is slowly receeding to the rear view mirror of those brash TheoCons in Washington, if not to the American soldiers stranded there as pawns of the chickenhawks.
Iran is looking better and better to the feverish minds in our Capitol. Dear Leader promised no option was off the table to Iran, and to prove it he did for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad what Osama bin Laden did for him: roused the base by insults on the eve of the election.
Ahmadinejad doubtless stole his presidential election like Bu$h did his- both of them.
Bu$hCo has a long track record of profiting from Iranian ire.
There have been illegal Halliburton deals in Iran as linked here and here.
There have been illegal Bechtel-Iran deals (and others) here and here.
Let's not forget Darth Rumsfeld's Swiss corporation, ABB, that loves it some Iranian nukes too.
Or Iran-Contra.
The problem with Endless War as economic and social policy is that sooner or later you encounter somebody who can end it for you.
Monday, January 02, 2006
When Worlds Collide
The tragedy of New Orleans provides Americans with an ominous metaphor for understanding our future. We did not fix the levees, though we were warned. That is a simple way of expressing the national predicament in this new century. As a society, we are engulfed by similar vulnerabilities-forms of ecological and economic deterioration that are profoundly more threatening than an occasional hurricane. And we have been told. Yet we are not "fixing the levees." Preoccupied with current desires and discontents, this very wealthy nation has lost sight of its future.
The levee metaphor, vividly dramatized by the Gulf Coast disaster, has the potential to move the country in a new direction-to inspire a generational shift in thinking that could launch a new era of fundamental reforms. But the imperative to act requires nothing less than a reordering of American life-a result that seems most unlikely. Given the corrupted condition of representative democracy, politicians are seldom punished for keeping the hard truth from voters. The mass culture marinates American citizens in false triumphalism.
Events, nevertheless, have delivered a teachable moment-an opportunity to reframe and reargue many long-neglected matters. The wheels are coming off the right-wing bus. The President of Oil and War is no longer much believed. The vast suffering and physical destruction in New Orleans have made all too visible what ecologists and social critics have been trying to explain for years. Their warnings once seemed too abstract or remote to require public action. New Orleans announced, for those who will listen, that the future is now.
Oceans are warming, the Arctic ice cap is shrinking. The deep topsoil of Iowa is draining into the Mississippi River, leaving behind chemical swamps. Good drinking water, once freely available to all, has become a scarce commodity for commercial exploitation. Much of the population, dispersed farther and farther from urban centers, is pole-axed by soaring gasoline prices. Meanwhile, the gorgeous abundance of consumer goods continues to poison earth, air and water. This year, Americans will throw away something like 100 million cell phones, pagers, pocket PCs and portable music players, interring their toxic contents in the "dump" called nature.
Should we blame the farmers? The oil and chemical companies? The teenagers who love their gadgets? The politics of blame-and-shame was brilliantly perfected thirty years ago by the environmental movement but gradually lost its effectiveness, partly because it framed the contest as a righteous struggle between good guys and bad guys-virtuous citizens versus dirty industrial polluters (and often their workers). It felt good to identify the culprits, but moral indignation eventually loses its power to enforce. Plus, the enormity of what we face is too all-encompassing. Not many of us can truly claim innocence.
The predicament is fundamental and universal: It is the collision between industrial society and nature...
...The Apollo Alliance offers one positive model for reshaping the future. It started from the premise that American politics will not undertake a serious agenda on global warming and alternative energy sources until labor groups and environmentalists come together on the objective. "When Apollo started, political progress on energy was mired in the jobs-versus-environment debate," says Jeff Rickert, Apollo's acting executive director. "In order to break that deadlock, we proposed a new way of thinking-a plan that removed the wedge between environmentalists and labor unions by focusing on the job-creating aspects of a clean-energy investment policy."
Packaged and tested with rigorous economic analysis, the Apollo proposal calls for a ten-year, $300 billion investment agenda-federal financing to foster development of alternative fuels, innovative eco firms and energy-conserving reforms in housing, green building codes, transportation and other realms. These investments, analysts estimate, would generate 3.3 million new jobs. One strategist noted a resemblance to John F. Kennedy's moon-landing initiative in the 1960s-an endeavor that also created high-wage skilled jobs and new tech sectors. Overcoming the ecological threat could become this generation's Apollo project. Hence the name.
The public capital would be invested-some directly, some as subsidy incentives-in new fuels (solar, hydrogen, biomass, wind); in high-efficiency vehicles as a transition to post-petroleum transportation; in rebuilding urban infrastructure for "smart growth"; in rapid transit and regional rail networks like the high-speed Maglev trains; and in a modernized electrical system that reduces carbon emissions and increases efficient transmission. These and other ventures, Apollo analysts estimate, would generate $1.4 trillion in GDP gain for the United States, and nearly $1 trillion more in personal incomes. The investments would be accompanied by stronger regulatory protections to make sure the subsidies produce real results...
The problem is the ecological and economic disasters looming aren't just the blind stumbling of a consumer-driven society off the edge of a cliff.
The problem is that our society is being manipulated by a variety of factions who would rather rule in a feudal post-Malthusian condition than compete in a progessive sophisticated culture.
TheoCons or any religious fundamentalists don't want safe clean alternative energy. They don't want a humane green world where poverty is eliminated. They want their own righteous rule, or in lieu of that, apocalypse.
The levee metaphor, vividly dramatized by the Gulf Coast disaster, has the potential to move the country in a new direction-to inspire a generational shift in thinking that could launch a new era of fundamental reforms. But the imperative to act requires nothing less than a reordering of American life-a result that seems most unlikely. Given the corrupted condition of representative democracy, politicians are seldom punished for keeping the hard truth from voters. The mass culture marinates American citizens in false triumphalism.
Events, nevertheless, have delivered a teachable moment-an opportunity to reframe and reargue many long-neglected matters. The wheels are coming off the right-wing bus. The President of Oil and War is no longer much believed. The vast suffering and physical destruction in New Orleans have made all too visible what ecologists and social critics have been trying to explain for years. Their warnings once seemed too abstract or remote to require public action. New Orleans announced, for those who will listen, that the future is now.
Oceans are warming, the Arctic ice cap is shrinking. The deep topsoil of Iowa is draining into the Mississippi River, leaving behind chemical swamps. Good drinking water, once freely available to all, has become a scarce commodity for commercial exploitation. Much of the population, dispersed farther and farther from urban centers, is pole-axed by soaring gasoline prices. Meanwhile, the gorgeous abundance of consumer goods continues to poison earth, air and water. This year, Americans will throw away something like 100 million cell phones, pagers, pocket PCs and portable music players, interring their toxic contents in the "dump" called nature.
Should we blame the farmers? The oil and chemical companies? The teenagers who love their gadgets? The politics of blame-and-shame was brilliantly perfected thirty years ago by the environmental movement but gradually lost its effectiveness, partly because it framed the contest as a righteous struggle between good guys and bad guys-virtuous citizens versus dirty industrial polluters (and often their workers). It felt good to identify the culprits, but moral indignation eventually loses its power to enforce. Plus, the enormity of what we face is too all-encompassing. Not many of us can truly claim innocence.
The predicament is fundamental and universal: It is the collision between industrial society and nature...
...The Apollo Alliance offers one positive model for reshaping the future. It started from the premise that American politics will not undertake a serious agenda on global warming and alternative energy sources until labor groups and environmentalists come together on the objective. "When Apollo started, political progress on energy was mired in the jobs-versus-environment debate," says Jeff Rickert, Apollo's acting executive director. "In order to break that deadlock, we proposed a new way of thinking-a plan that removed the wedge between environmentalists and labor unions by focusing on the job-creating aspects of a clean-energy investment policy."
Packaged and tested with rigorous economic analysis, the Apollo proposal calls for a ten-year, $300 billion investment agenda-federal financing to foster development of alternative fuels, innovative eco firms and energy-conserving reforms in housing, green building codes, transportation and other realms. These investments, analysts estimate, would generate 3.3 million new jobs. One strategist noted a resemblance to John F. Kennedy's moon-landing initiative in the 1960s-an endeavor that also created high-wage skilled jobs and new tech sectors. Overcoming the ecological threat could become this generation's Apollo project. Hence the name.
The public capital would be invested-some directly, some as subsidy incentives-in new fuels (solar, hydrogen, biomass, wind); in high-efficiency vehicles as a transition to post-petroleum transportation; in rebuilding urban infrastructure for "smart growth"; in rapid transit and regional rail networks like the high-speed Maglev trains; and in a modernized electrical system that reduces carbon emissions and increases efficient transmission. These and other ventures, Apollo analysts estimate, would generate $1.4 trillion in GDP gain for the United States, and nearly $1 trillion more in personal incomes. The investments would be accompanied by stronger regulatory protections to make sure the subsidies produce real results...
The problem is the ecological and economic disasters looming aren't just the blind stumbling of a consumer-driven society off the edge of a cliff.
The problem is that our society is being manipulated by a variety of factions who would rather rule in a feudal post-Malthusian condition than compete in a progessive sophisticated culture.
TheoCons or any religious fundamentalists don't want safe clean alternative energy. They don't want a humane green world where poverty is eliminated. They want their own righteous rule, or in lieu of that, apocalypse.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
"I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking."
Indeed.
Maybe it's something like this:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Pentagon Domestic Spying
An NBC Nightly News piece yesterday on domestic spying by the military featured yours truly discussing an intelligence database of 1,519 "suspicious incidents" that covers the period July 2004-May 2005.
The database -- which I obtained from a military source -- is a rare look inside the actual work of the Defense Department conducting counter-terrorism and "force protection" missions inside the United States. Building on the NBC story, what does the database actually show?
The database includes three categories of incidents: The first are actual, seemingly valid potential terrorism tip-offs. The second category of incidents are anti-war and anti-military protests by civilians. The third are security incidents with only the most tentative terrorism connection.
The second category of "incidents" -- those based on surveillance of anti-war and anti-nuclear groups, as well as students and others protesters -- should be disturbing to any Americans who care about civil liberties in this age of counter-terrorism because they indicate that military intelligence and local law enforcement agencies are routinely watching lawful protests.
But it is the third category of incidents that is the most numerous, the most revealing and the most corrosive. The hyper vigilant homeland security types probably wouldn't be monitoring the web sites, intercepting the Emails, and sending undercover agents into meetings of lawful and peaceful Americans if they had not accumulated this mass of self-perpetuating "threat" reporting that does little more than pad a database to suggest domestic dangers by sheer repetition.
These domestic threat mirages accumulated by a directionless system actually serve to weaken counter-terrorism efforts by diverting attention from real problems and actual threats. What is more, the "suspicious activity" mentality that breeds government collection and overreach is at the core of almost all of America's problems since 9/11, domestically and overseas.
The Defense Department database -- prepared by the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which I have already written about and Walter Pincus has been reporting on for this newspaper -- is the first real inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection since 9/11.
Under the excuse of "force protection" -- what the Defense Department told NBC News was the "protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel" -- U.S. military special agents and military police constantly report any suspicious activity that might conceivably suggest a potential threat.
In last night's report, NBC focused on one such report, the monitoring of an anti-war Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida by the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group (that, according to the database). The database categorizes the meeting, which was to plan a protest at a military recruitment station, as a "threat."
"This is incredible," said one group member. "It's an example of paranoia by our government," he says. "We're not doing anything illegal."
The database includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests as "threats."...
...But most important, the database includes hundreds upon hundreds of incidents that are not only labeled "not credible" but also are absurd indicators of any kind of threat. An example:
* August 2004, Atlanta, Georgia, a Navy enlisted man is arrested for driving under the influence by the Cobb County Police Department "and upon search of vehicle, discovered a picture of Usama bin Laden displayed as a screensaver on E-4's cellular telephone."
Send that goofball to Guantanamo!
The database is jammed packed with these types of silly reports. I've already written about CIFA's concern about stolen or lost identification cards; the database includes 109 incidents -- that's almost 10 percent -- where military people mostly report losing their IDs.
Anybody out there have kids who perhaps conduct this "suspicious activity"? 1-800-CALLSPY, and I'm not kidding: The 902nd Military Intelligence Group is standing by.
One after another, over and over, potential surveillance, "solicitation" of military wives, crank bomb threats, girls trying to get onto military bases to see their boyfriends without ID, that is the stuff of CIFA's "suspicious activity" database.
None of these incidents go anywhere. There is not one case where the "subject" is found to be an actual threat.
Welcome to Rumsfeld and Cheney's world of "actionable intelligence" where no scrap of information is too trivial, where the "dots" must be connected to find the next hijack conspiracy, where the seemingly innocent in bars and strip joints and mosques and college campuses and Quaker meeting houses could be the next Jose Padilla or Mohamed Atta.
It is this assumption that everything is potential actionable intelligence that has led to renditions and torture and secrets prisons abroad. Now in the United States, it is contributing to an ever growing domestic military, intelligence and law enforcement triangle. I'm torn between saying that these homeland security goons are a menace and suggesting that perhaps if they are so gung ho they should get on the next plane and employ their fabulous talents in Iraq.
Perhaps Iraq is in the shape it's in because these are precisely the techniques these goons have been applying. Cracking down on the little guy and letting the real terrorists- like the Iran-backed Chalabi- run free.
Some of the comments to this are particularly germane:
...why did 3+ FBI agents incl Randy Glass, Robert Wright, and Sibel Edmonds claim that they were being OBSTRUCTED in tracking terrorism. That alone should be enough for an inquiry.
But what of our past Nat Security Adviser who BRAGGED that he created Al-Qaida for geo-political chess-playing, and to LURE the Soviets into Afghanistan?
The CIA funded the "Mujahideen Al-Qaida Project" for 25 years, and this is quietly admitted. But there was joint operations in Aug 2001, per Chossudovsky.
It only cost US taxpayers $6 billion to $20 billion to fund Al-Qaida via Pakistan, plus their protected heroin sales, plus Clinton funded the Taliban govt for $6 billion more.
Does this sound like TINFOIL? Or BLACK GOLD? (and anti-communism)
What of James Baker claiming Saudis have "diplomatic immunity" from being sued by 9-11 widows -- blocking even 'discovery' -- while they lock up the Padillas and Al-Arians and Damras of the world?
What about Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, our ALLY, funding the terrorists on Venice Florida?
What of Chertoff defending Dr. Elamir who funneled millions of OPM "offshore" and had contacts with Al-Qaida?
What of Bush's longstanding relations with all the Bin Laden oil players?
What about FBI PROTECTS OSAMA BIN LADEN’S “RIGHT TO PRIVACY”?
What about Let Bin Laden stay free, says CIA man ("Buzzy" Krongard)?
What about BILL CLINTON and "OSAMAGATE", as reported (but quashed) by the Republican Party Committee?
ALL THIS IS MAINSTREAM NEWS, ALBEIT BARELY.
But you'd have to be really naïve to see ALL this (and more) and think it's all just a bunch of coincidences.
Naive, or well paid.
Maybe it's something like this:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Pentagon Domestic Spying
An NBC Nightly News piece yesterday on domestic spying by the military featured yours truly discussing an intelligence database of 1,519 "suspicious incidents" that covers the period July 2004-May 2005.
The database -- which I obtained from a military source -- is a rare look inside the actual work of the Defense Department conducting counter-terrorism and "force protection" missions inside the United States. Building on the NBC story, what does the database actually show?
The database includes three categories of incidents: The first are actual, seemingly valid potential terrorism tip-offs. The second category of incidents are anti-war and anti-military protests by civilians. The third are security incidents with only the most tentative terrorism connection.
The second category of "incidents" -- those based on surveillance of anti-war and anti-nuclear groups, as well as students and others protesters -- should be disturbing to any Americans who care about civil liberties in this age of counter-terrorism because they indicate that military intelligence and local law enforcement agencies are routinely watching lawful protests.
But it is the third category of incidents that is the most numerous, the most revealing and the most corrosive. The hyper vigilant homeland security types probably wouldn't be monitoring the web sites, intercepting the Emails, and sending undercover agents into meetings of lawful and peaceful Americans if they had not accumulated this mass of self-perpetuating "threat" reporting that does little more than pad a database to suggest domestic dangers by sheer repetition.
These domestic threat mirages accumulated by a directionless system actually serve to weaken counter-terrorism efforts by diverting attention from real problems and actual threats. What is more, the "suspicious activity" mentality that breeds government collection and overreach is at the core of almost all of America's problems since 9/11, domestically and overseas.
The Defense Department database -- prepared by the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which I have already written about and Walter Pincus has been reporting on for this newspaper -- is the first real inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection since 9/11.
Under the excuse of "force protection" -- what the Defense Department told NBC News was the "protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel" -- U.S. military special agents and military police constantly report any suspicious activity that might conceivably suggest a potential threat.
In last night's report, NBC focused on one such report, the monitoring of an anti-war Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida by the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group (that, according to the database). The database categorizes the meeting, which was to plan a protest at a military recruitment station, as a "threat."
"This is incredible," said one group member. "It's an example of paranoia by our government," he says. "We're not doing anything illegal."
The database includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests as "threats."...
...But most important, the database includes hundreds upon hundreds of incidents that are not only labeled "not credible" but also are absurd indicators of any kind of threat. An example:
* August 2004, Atlanta, Georgia, a Navy enlisted man is arrested for driving under the influence by the Cobb County Police Department "and upon search of vehicle, discovered a picture of Usama bin Laden displayed as a screensaver on E-4's cellular telephone."
Send that goofball to Guantanamo!
The database is jammed packed with these types of silly reports. I've already written about CIFA's concern about stolen or lost identification cards; the database includes 109 incidents -- that's almost 10 percent -- where military people mostly report losing their IDs.
Anybody out there have kids who perhaps conduct this "suspicious activity"? 1-800-CALLSPY, and I'm not kidding: The 902nd Military Intelligence Group is standing by.
One after another, over and over, potential surveillance, "solicitation" of military wives, crank bomb threats, girls trying to get onto military bases to see their boyfriends without ID, that is the stuff of CIFA's "suspicious activity" database.
None of these incidents go anywhere. There is not one case where the "subject" is found to be an actual threat.
Welcome to Rumsfeld and Cheney's world of "actionable intelligence" where no scrap of information is too trivial, where the "dots" must be connected to find the next hijack conspiracy, where the seemingly innocent in bars and strip joints and mosques and college campuses and Quaker meeting houses could be the next Jose Padilla or Mohamed Atta.
It is this assumption that everything is potential actionable intelligence that has led to renditions and torture and secrets prisons abroad. Now in the United States, it is contributing to an ever growing domestic military, intelligence and law enforcement triangle. I'm torn between saying that these homeland security goons are a menace and suggesting that perhaps if they are so gung ho they should get on the next plane and employ their fabulous talents in Iraq.
Perhaps Iraq is in the shape it's in because these are precisely the techniques these goons have been applying. Cracking down on the little guy and letting the real terrorists- like the Iran-backed Chalabi- run free.
Some of the comments to this are particularly germane:
...why did 3+ FBI agents incl Randy Glass, Robert Wright, and Sibel Edmonds claim that they were being OBSTRUCTED in tracking terrorism. That alone should be enough for an inquiry.
But what of our past Nat Security Adviser who BRAGGED that he created Al-Qaida for geo-political chess-playing, and to LURE the Soviets into Afghanistan?
The CIA funded the "Mujahideen Al-Qaida Project" for 25 years, and this is quietly admitted. But there was joint operations in Aug 2001, per Chossudovsky.
It only cost US taxpayers $6 billion to $20 billion to fund Al-Qaida via Pakistan, plus their protected heroin sales, plus Clinton funded the Taliban govt for $6 billion more.
Does this sound like TINFOIL? Or BLACK GOLD? (and anti-communism)
What of James Baker claiming Saudis have "diplomatic immunity" from being sued by 9-11 widows -- blocking even 'discovery' -- while they lock up the Padillas and Al-Arians and Damras of the world?
What about Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, our ALLY, funding the terrorists on Venice Florida?
What of Chertoff defending Dr. Elamir who funneled millions of OPM "offshore" and had contacts with Al-Qaida?
What of Bush's longstanding relations with all the Bin Laden oil players?
What about FBI PROTECTS OSAMA BIN LADEN’S “RIGHT TO PRIVACY”?
What about Let Bin Laden stay free, says CIA man ("Buzzy" Krongard)?
What about BILL CLINTON and "OSAMAGATE", as reported (but quashed) by the Republican Party Committee?
ALL THIS IS MAINSTREAM NEWS, ALBEIT BARELY.
But you'd have to be really naïve to see ALL this (and more) and think it's all just a bunch of coincidences.
Naive, or well paid.
Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year
Main and Central begins to notice that many are starting to notice a pattern.
It's not a conspiracy theory: rather, an emergent conspiracy.
There are simply too many Powers in the world that would see a strong democratic republic like the United States as a threat.
From the Saudi Royals to the Carlyle boardroom, from China to Russia, from Bill Frist to Joe Lieberman, there are many people and parties and nations and corporate entities that would like to end the secular humanist American experiment.
Hang on, True Believers, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
It's not a conspiracy theory: rather, an emergent conspiracy.
There are simply too many Powers in the world that would see a strong democratic republic like the United States as a threat.
From the Saudi Royals to the Carlyle boardroom, from China to Russia, from Bill Frist to Joe Lieberman, there are many people and parties and nations and corporate entities that would like to end the secular humanist American experiment.
Hang on, True Believers, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
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