Discourse.net

The Long Tail (the Other One)

Now here’s an interesting heresy: Scrivener’s Error says,

In every declared symmetric conflict in the gunpowder era, the side with the higher tail-to-teeth ratio has won the conflict. Not every battle; not every asymmetric or undeclared conflict, although even there it’s statistically significant in favor of the big-tail forces. But every “war” has been won by the tail, not the teeth.

…

The short version of this is “Brave soldiers win battles; brave REMFs win wars.”

It just has to be the right sort of tail.

Spot the Outlier

Group News Blog: Legions of Imperial America:

The United States of America spends 56% of total government military spending on Planet Earth, with a published FY2008 military budget of $623 billion* (in 2008 dollars). China is a distant second at 6% with an estimated 2004 military budget of $65 billion. The entire “Axis of Evil” (with Pakistan thrown in for good measure) spends barely 1% at less than $15 billion.

More Evidence for the 'Carriers Are Obsolete' Theory

While they excel in force projection against weak third world nations, there have been increasing signs that aircraft carriers are also awfully big targets. Some suggested that in these days of cruise missiles, the carrier’s days were numbered.

Now comes some suggestion in the UK Daily Mail that even old-tech submarines are too quiet for anti-sub technology: The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced.

Not from the world’s most reliable source, and there seems very little about it in the newspapers as yet, although the blogs are all over it. The Agonist asks if this Daily Mail story (which gives neither the name nor the date of the US exercise) is actually old news being re-floated at budget time?

Paranoia By a Master of the Genre

Further evidence that I am insufficiently paranoid: Dispatches from the Frozen North runs with my post on the Swede who emailed the FBI that his son-in-law was a terrorist in order to scuttle a business trip (Foreigners Still Don’t Realize How Dumb Our Government Is).

He has some great scary scenarios which are likely being adopted by al Queada right now, now that he’s spelled them out (and the likely over-reactions) in such lovely detail.

Only problem is that the FBI is now interviewing the author. (This last part is, I think, a joke.)

Dumber than Fiction

I swear, if I saw this in a movie, I’d turn off the DVD on the grounds that it was just too stupid to be worth wasting my time.

Firedoglake, The Falafel Squad,

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails….

But I don’t watch movies that dumb.

UPDATE (11/9): FBI Denies Data Mining Grocery Records

Conduct Unbecoming

Glenn Greenwald has an odd exchange with an Army Colonel.

There’s a lot of evidence that the Army is politicized: after all, the senior officers are in the tank for GWB or they are forced out. The junior officers are leaving in droves as a result. The enlisted appear divided, with a very substantial group at least unhappy about the war with no end in sight.

This isn’t good, but I wonder how different it really is from Vietnam. You know, that conflict from which the Colin Powell’s Army said it learned so many lessons. Before it forgot them.

The Strange History of Bra Removal

Back in the day, well actually sorta kinda before my day, bra removal (and in the mythologized version of history, maybe even bra burning) was a countercultural pheonomenon. If not real hippies than at least radlibs and feminists rebelling against the hated symbol of the patriarchy.

Today, it’s The Man (yes, the man), the TLAs the TSAs, behind “Taking off your bra for national security”:

… According to the Associated Press, [Lori] Plato set off security alarms when she and her husband were entering a federal courthouse in Coeur d’Alene. Plato told the AP that the U.S. Marshals Service not only asked Plato to remove her bra but gave her no viable options for doing so with any measure of privacy: “I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn’t have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available. They said, ‘No.’”

Does this count as progress?

Maybe it will after the lawsuit.

It’s worth reading the AP version of the story to see just how weak the defense is:

McDonald acknowledged that security workers told Plato that she couldn’t pass through security wearing the bra but said she wasn’t ordered to remove it.

“She’s inflating it,” U.S. Marshal Patrick McDonald said. “All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn’t anything we wanted to happen and it wasn’t anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”

I could do that cross-examination. I’d enjoy it.

Didn't We Used to Call This Bribery or a Slush Fund or Something?

Money for nothing, but it surely makes for ‘friendships’.

Air Force Arranged No-Work Contract: While waiting to be confirmed by the White House for a top civilian post at the Air Force last year, Charles D. Riechers was out of work and wanted a paycheck. So the Air Force helped arrange a job through an intelligence contractor that required him to do no work for the company, according to documents and interviews.

For two months, Riechers held the title of senior technical adviser and received about $13,400 a month at Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, a nonprofit firm in Johnstown, Pa., according to his resume. But during that time he actually worked for Sue C. Payton, assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, on projects that had nothing to do with CRI, he said.

Riechers said in an interview that his interactions with Commonwealth Research were limited largely to a Christmas party, where he said he met company officials for the first time.

“I really didn’t do anything for CRI,” said Riechers, now principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. “I got a paycheck from them.”

And how did Congress confirm him? Did they know about this? If not, why not?

Plus, it seems like Commonwealth is a GOP piggy bank.

Concurrent’s top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier. Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.

It’s a charity, it pays folks big bucks, and it lobbies too. And it’s rewarded for all this with money from the black (secret) budget, plus ‘faith-based’ money which we know is a cover for the GOP feeding its base.

Speaking of which, is there any chance that a Democratic administration will cut off this ‘faith-based’ funding or will the GOP machine still be at the federal trough?

Faulty Intelligence

This error about FISA wasn’t a little trivial slip of the tongue, but rather a fact going to the very heart of the political debate over whether our pre-existing FISA regime sufficed to fight terrorism.

Think Progress » DNI McConnell: I Lied To The Senate Earlier this week, in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.

A government official later told the New York Times that McConnell was wrong, and that the intelligence had been collected under the old FISA law which required warrants. A chorus of House Democrats immediately raised concerns about McConnell’s claims.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) demanded McConnell back up his sworn statement. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said the Protect America Act “played no role in uncovering the recent German terrorist plot.” House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes urge McConnell “to issue a public statement immediately” correcting his remarks.

In a statement released today, McConnell unapologetically acknowledged he lied to the Senate:

Either Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lied to the Senate or he believed what he said when he said it.

So either we have a liar or a dunce running our national intelligence service. No wonder he fits in with Bush, Rove and Gonzales.

POGO Asks If Marine Corps Lied to Senator Levin about MRAP Request?

Nick Schwellenbach of the Project On Government Oversight has a very interesting post at the POGO Blog asking whether the Marine Corps Lied to Senator Levin about MRAP Request:

Marine Corps claims described in congressional correspondence are at odds with the actual text of a February 2005 urgent needs request from Marines in Iraq.

In a letter Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) on June 26, 2007 (pdf), the following was written:

Press reports about the February 2005 Marine Corps Urgent Operational Needs Statement [pdf] that you referenced in your letter concerned me a great deal as well. Since learning of this needs statement, my Committee staff has met with the Marine Corps multiple times. The Marine Corps' answer to the Committee staff has been two-fold: 1) the Marine Corps has initiated its own internal review of how urgent operational needs statements are handled; and 2) the Marine Corps indicated that the request from theater called for more effective armor materiel, which came in the form of fragmentation kit upgrades, rather than a specialized vehicle like the MRAP. I have directed my Committee staff to continue meeting with the Marine Corps on this matter until the internal review is completed. [Emphasis added]

However, even the briefest look at the February 2005 request (pdf) shows otherwise; that is, that the Marines on the ground, in Iraq, requested MRAPs specifically.  The first lines in that document on the first page, under "Description of Need," are:

MINE RESISTANT AMBUSH PROTECTED (MRAP) VEHICLE. This is a Priority 1 Urgent UNS in support of OIF EDL. Total AO requirement is 1169.
There is an immediate need for an MRAP vehicle capability to increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in a hazardous fire area against known threats.

On its face, it seems that the Marine Corps engaged in telling the congressional staffers of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee a bold-faced lie.  The only other possibility is that Senator Levin's staffers misinterpreted or wrongly portrayed the Marine Corps' claims. 

If it's the former, Congress should consider prosecuting the responsible parties for making false statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  Congress cannot intelligently and adequately perform its legislative and oversight functions if the executive branch is not providing it with truthful information--hence the existence of 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  There need to be penalties for willfully misinforming Congress, especially on matters of life and death in wartime.  These requests were not made by bureaucrats at the Pentagon, but by Marines in Iraq regarding a vehicles which, if procured sooner, could possibly have saved the lives of hundreds. 

If Congress never penalizes or threatens to penalize those who lie to it, then it will only invite more dishonesty and a withering of its own stature.

I think the principle at stake is important. So too is the underlying factual issue: despite desperate pleas from the folks on the ground, the Pentagon decided not to send armored vehicles that could withstand IEDs in Iraq to US soldiers. At the same time, they made sending these vehicles to the Iraqi troops a priority. Why? Not clear -- kindest explanation is that they thought we'd be ought of there so quickly there would be no need for the improved armor; the stuff also makes the vehicles slow. Even so, that's no excuse for lying about it to Congress.

What He Said

The Carpetbagger Report points out the weird incongruity between two facts. On the one hand, the high (relative) degree of assimilation/economic opportunity of Arabs and other Muslims in the US, a fact likely correlated with the relatively lower rate of homegrown Muslim terrorism here. And on the other hand, the xenophobic right’s attempt to make life so miserable for Muslim immigrants, a policy that seems designed to ensure that we start having problems like certain countries in Europe.

(I’d note that opportunity and assimilation isn’t perfect inoculation, but even so, it surely helps.)

Do We Need the Trident Submarine?

William M. Arkin has a thought-provoking article today about the role of the Trident submarine (and also attack submarines) in the post-Cold-War world. Have a look at More Subs, Fewer Boots on the Ground.

I’m sure that if Trident were free it would be of some positive value to national security. But it’s far from free, and I don’t know enough about military strategy to have a confident view as to whether Trident is worth what we spend on it. (If I had to guess, I’d be tempted to suggest that we keep Trident and instead ramp down the land-based ICBMS and especially the potentially destabilizing bunker-busters.) I do know enough about politics to know that there is of course zero chance of anyone actually advocating abolishing an entire branch of one of the services — stopping a single weapon system is hard enough, even if tests demonstrate that it is useless — so it may be a waste of time to even think about Trident. Look at how long horse cavalry survived into the age of the machine gun and the tank.

It’s interesting, though, to imagine some zero-based thinking about our armed forces. If we were starting with a blank slate, where would we put the resources?

In reality, of course, you never start with a blank slate, and it is very hard to walk away from sunk costs, especially when it would take so long to rebuild the program from scratch were it ever to be determined that closing down the program was a mistake. Trident has been a part of the national security blanket for a generation. Losing it would be too scary for anyone in power to even contemplate.

Dangerous People

It’s true that the “common law court” movement includes a lot of nutty people and probably some dangerous ones. And it’s true that some of the things they do overlap with legal activities (although they often take it waaay too far). So I have a little sympathy for the bureaucrats who produced the boneheaded leaflet and training materials being mercilessly skewered by Homeland Stupidity at You are the homegrown terrorist threat. But only a little.

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in Phoenix, Ariz., distributed a brochure (Images: 1, 2) to local law enforcement agencies a few years ago which defines terrorism as individuals or groups within the U.S. who engage in criminal activity to promote political or social changes. This is correct, as far as it goes, but the brochure then gives a listing of “suspicious” activities, telling law enforcement officers: “If you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Some of the things for which you should be reported as a suspected terrorist include the usual things, like weapons of mass destruction, and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis, but also includes people who “Make numerous references to US Constitution,” “Claim driving is a right, not a privilege” and “Attempt to ‘police the police.’”

As regular readers know, I make frequent references to the US Constitution, and believe that there is constitutional right to travel — although its application to cars is a bit of a mess. And I’m all for policing the police although other than going to traffic court I’ve not done much of that myself.

Please don’t report me.

Loonie Indeed

You might recall this post, Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?, back from January. Basically, US security types got all excited about “bugged” Canadian coins. Here’s a reminder of what they were saying:

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence. …

“On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors’ employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons,” the report says. …

Well, several months later, we know the truth: they’re nuts. ‘Poppy Quarter’ Behind Spy Coin Alert:

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a U.S. Defense Department false espionage warning earlier this year about mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.

The harmless “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

But, of course, they weren’t anything of the kind.

And we wonder why they can’t catch bin Laden?

NSA: World Citizens Need Not Apply

I’ve always thought of the NSA as the best of our spooks, so “I Was Recruited by the NSA” made me sad.

Other people linking to this make a fuss about the NSA objecting to excessive file sharing are a bar to employment. I’m not sure I agree. If the file sharing was known to be illegal, it suggests you are not a by-the-book kind of straight arrow. And I’m OK with the NSA wanting only the most punctiliously honest employees.

No, what made me sad was the “no Peace Corps veterans” rule. I understand that clearing anyone who has lived for a substantial time abroad is a challenge, but I would have thought that the NSA would be better off with the occasional Peace Corps idealist. And I would also have thought that the missions of the two agencies were not inimical. The NSA, sadly, seems to see it differently.

As most people who have done anything involving a clearance know, recent Peace Corps service is a definite bar to a clearance. During the first hour, the female recruiter couches it in terms of the Peace Corps and the NSA have conflicting missions. But later, she points out that the travel and the problems in doing background checks were a factor.

I’d have thought that the idealism and knowledge about the world were worth the effort.

Please Help Me Debunk Superbowl Tailgate Rumor

There's this rumor going around that I refuse to believe. Please help me debunk it.

The story -- related to me at dinner in all seriousness by a serious person who convinced me that he believed it-- is that Homeland Security have banned tailgate parties at the Super Bowl, which you may have heard is being held in Miami this year.

I've been somewhat distressed to see how meekly Americans put up with 'security theater' requirements that restrict their freedoms while adding at best minuscule amounts to actual security. But if the day comes when football fans will give up their tailgate parties due to some diktat from Homeland Security, well, that's the day that I'll have to admit beyond peradventure that the people who hate our freedoms have won.

I did a little google search and can't find anything which suggests such a limit might be in force, which strengthens my belief that this is an urban legend. (I did find some fun debunking of other Super Bowl related urban legends.)

I did find this long list of security restrictions on what you can bring into Dolphin Stadium but I don't read this as applying to the parking areas where the tailgate parties happen.

Full text of the somewhat Draconian security rules for entrance into the stadium reproduced below. I wonder if the rumor is based on these?

SUPER BOWL GAME DAY RESTRICTIONS

Every person attending Super Bowl XLI at Dolphin Stadium is required to have a ticket, regardless of age or size.

Screening Procedures for Those Attending Super Bowl XLI

Security screening at Dolphin Stadium will be significantly heightened for the Super Bowl. Many items usually permitted in NFL events will not be allowed into the Super Bowl. The National Football League and the Miami-Dade Police Department strongly recommend that spectators minimize the number and size of all items carried into the Stadium.

All items carried by spectators will be carefully inspected and potentially not allowed into the Stadium. Spectators are urged to bring nothing larger than a very small purse or bag. The NFL, Dolphin Stadium and the Miami-Dade Police Department will not hold prohibited or excluded items for spectators.

Safety and security of all fans is still at the forefront in preparation for Super Bowl XLI.

THE FOLLOWING ITEMS CANNOT BE BROUGHT INTO DOLPHIN STADIUM:

Weapons, Knives and Explosives
Fireworks
Camcorders
Laser Lights and Pointers
Strollers
Inflatables (Beach Balls, etc.)
Throwing Objects (Footballs, etc.)
Poles or Sticks
Banners
Animals (Except Service Animals)
Noisemakers and Horns
Food and Beverages
Containers of any type:

* Coolers (of any size)
* Bottles
* Cans, Hairspray
* Camera and Binocular Cases/Tripods
* Mace / Pepper Spray

Large Bags including:

* Backpacks
* Duffel and Grocery Bags
* Luggage

Umbrellas
Laptop Computers

Additional Information

Size Requirements -- All permissible items carried by spectators must measure no more then 12 inches x 12 inches x 12 inches.

Cameras and Binoculars -- Small cameras and binoculars will be allowed. Camera cases and binocular cases of any size are prohibited. No spectator cameras with lenses over six inches (6") long will be permitted. Again, camcorders will be prohibited.

Electronic devices -- Spectators are strongly urged not to bring electronic devices of any sort into the Stadium. Any electronic device will be thoroughly inspected causing delays of the individual spectator, as well as other patrons. Electronic devices include, but are not limited to, cellular telephones, pagers, miniature televisions and radios, and personal digital assistants (PDA's).

Prohibited items and items determined to be not appropriate for entry into the Stadium will be the responsibility of the ticket holder and cannot be accepted or checked by the NFL, Dolphin Stadium or the Miami-Dade Police Department. We urge spectators to secure these items in vehicles or hotel rooms.

The cooperation, patience and understanding of spectators is greatly appreciated by the National Football League, Dolphin Stadium and the Miami-Dade Police Department. The cooperation of all spectators will greatly aid in the level of security provided to all in attendance at these events.

Are We Starving Our Soldiers?

Meals for Marines in Afghanistan insufficient, report states. Apparently Marines trying to subsist on MREs are starving, losing so much weight that they need medical evacuation.

If there’s any truth to this, Congress should get on top of it.

Nothing To See Here, Move Along

TheStar.com - News - U.S. retracts spy coins claim

It seems there's no danger of your spare change spying on you after all.

A U.S. government defence agency has suddenly retracted its claim that Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters were planted on at least three American contractors who visited Canada.

It's the latest twist in an intriguing cash caper.

...

In a statement posted late Friday on its website, the Defense Security Service said the coin claims were based on a report provided to the agency.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the statement said, adding that "the 2006 annual report should not have contained this information."

The service's acting director has ordered an internal review of the circumstances leading up to publication of the information "to prevent incidents like this" from recurring.

A spokeswoman for the agency was unavailable Saturday.

As recently as Wednesday, the Defense Security Service insisted the risk was genuine.

"What's in the report is true," agency spokeswoman Martha Deutscher told The Associated Press. "This is indeed a sanitized version, which leaves a lot of questions."

Earlier item, Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?.

Is that a Loonie in Your Pocket or is Someone Else Glad to See Me?

Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says: They say money talks, and a new report suggests Canadian currency is indeed chatting, at least electronically, on behalf of shadowy spies.

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence. ...

"On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors' employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons," the report says. ...

Bugging a coin with an RFID is a weird way to track people since they are likely to spend the coins.

Could this be a mad scientist economist doing a study on the velocity of money? Where's George on Canadian steroids?

Crow for Desert

Steve Clemons dines out with the Great and the Powerful and reports back Nightmare Confirmed: Things Are Soooo Bad. . .:

some of America's and Europe's leading current and former political personalities were there -- 60 people only -- and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.

And the conversations -- on the whole -- were about the crappy condition of America's national security position.

It seems that none of the people in charge have a clue how to improve what they consider to be the US's dismal national security situation. Which I take to mean Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the mid-East, the whole ball of wax.

But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.

Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said "don't hold your breath."

Maybe if they would just all quit in disgust we might get in a fresh team with an idea or two?

Or at least if there were enough resignations, Bush might get the message?

Time to Walk the Cat Back

This seems like rather a big deal: not only did the CIA admit the it has foreign prisons, but that there is a Presidential Order re: Foreign Detention Facilities which involves,

outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees, and a Justice Department legal analysis specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al-Qaeda members.

This will get interesting when Congress decides to resume its oversight duties.

Some 'Uniter'

The Post is good at stenography, so I guess he really said it.

Bush Says 'America Loses' Under Democrats: "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans packed in an arena at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, one of his stops Monday. "That's what's at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq."

Seven more days until the election, and the polls are still trending against the GOP in most (but not all races), so in all likelihood they haven't hit the bottom of their barrel yet.

What a thought.

Axis of Error

Remember the "Axis of evil"? That was what this administration called Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Then it invaded one of them -- the one without atomic weapons. The other two, who while they may be crazed in other ways reacted quite rationally to the obvious implicit threat of invasion, put their nuclear programs into higher gear.

Now it seems as if the North Koreans have exploded a nuclear weapon. While this may lead to some strict sanctions, it seems fairly clear that possession of a nuclear weapon also reduces to nearly zero the chance of foreign invasion. The chance of that was already quite small in the case of the North Koreans, but one can understand why they may not have wished to risk being wrong about that.

The North Korean government is one of the less rational ones on earth, so one can't say with confidence that a sensible policy on the US side would have guaranteed success at keeping them from going nuclear. One can say, however, that the current administration's abandonment of the Clinton policy of multilateralism and engagement ensured this dire outcome.

Chalk up one more disaster for this administration's failures to focus on what matters, and its general incompetence.

William Arkin is Not a Happy Camper

In today's online column Washington Post military affairs blogger William Arkin writes about "Vigilant Shield" which is the latest military exercise being run by the Pentagon. He calls it "particularly childish, a massive waste of money and an insult to the country" because it focuses on nuclear war with Russia -- not exactly one of our main threats today -- rather than any of the very real problems we are more likely to face:

One might think that NORTHCOM would be focused like a laser on preparing for another Sept. 11 or another Katrina, working through the details of just dealing with the obvious. Alas, some bomb going off somewhere, some natural disaster, doesn't justify missile defenses or other big ticket items like submarines, nor satellites and "early warning," nor the new tricks of cyber-warfare.

Want to know why the armed forces are hurting for soldiers and Marines? The few on the front lines defend the freedom of the extravagant in the Pentagon, the consulting world and defense industry to make billions.

In Defense of Stewart Baker

Thanks to a recent speech by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) making fun of his (unofficial?) title at the Dept. of Homeland Security ("Director for Lessons Learned") even my favorite bloggers are are piling on to attack Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker. I understand why it's almost irresistible, but I think it's wrong.

I am no close friend of Stewart Baker's, but I have had dealings with him over a period of years starting when he was the General Counsel of the NSA. I have a great respect for his intelligence, integrity and for his legal skill -- three comments I would make about far too few members of the current administration. You want competence in government? This is your guy.

Stewart and I disagree on many many issues of substance, but unlike the man he currently serves, Stewart has always been willing to engage with his critics and indeed is a regular speaker at Computers, Freedom and Privacy -- a place where his views regularly put him in a minority of little more than one.

There's evidence for the proposition that the post-9/11 Baker is a lot more hard-line than the guy I got to know in the cryptography wars. I suspect our views today diverge even more than they did when I knew him better. Nevertheless, I would have far more confidence in this government, and sleep much better at night, if we had a government full of people of his caliber.

Leave off, guys.

UPDATE: Someone wrote in to say that the "director of lessons learned" is a Stuart Baker, who is not the Stewart Baker I know. Being in London with a very unreliable and slow wifi connection leeched off a nearby hotel, I lack the tools to verify/disprove this contention but thought I should mention it. Anyone who finds out more is invited to comment.

More Bush Admin Security Theater

Some Ships Get Coast Guard Tip Before Searches.
I would understand this better if someone were being bribed. But 24 hours notice before searching ships for bombs, terrorists, and contraband generally, as a policy?

Musings on the Hayden Appointment

The politics of the Hayden nomination to the CIA are an object lesson in why the historian's task is so very difficult. For a series of complex and highly contingent reasons, almost every position on this issue is confusing, and often at odds with long-run stances. It's pretty hard to understand what is going on today; it will be even harder to recapture it in the future, and almost impossible to explain it to people who are not well marinated in all the messy details.

Let's start with the Bush administration. The administration describes its motive for choosing Hayden as a reflection of his long experience and knowledge -- in short, competence. That's always possible, but hardly characteristic of this administration. And in fact the nominee's indisputable competence is in sigint, not in humint, which is the area that most establishment observers say is the CIA's current crisis.

More plausibly, several commentators have suggested that this is intended as a wedge appointment. By picking a technocrat with a strong c.v. who has also made public statements arguably calling into question his understanding of and commitment to the Fourth Amendment, the Rovians thought they were setting up the Democrats to oppose an indisputably qualified candidate which would then allow the opponents to be accused of being soft on terror or having an archaic and feminine pre-9/11 vision of freedom.

A third, highly cynical, version says that this appointment was designed to fail: that it exists to give vulnerable Republican legislators something to be against so that they can create the appearance distance from the administration. This is not a plausible story because losing this nomination would make the administration look so weak that it might never recover.

What gives the third version the shred of plausibility is the vocal opposition to this nomination from the Republican right. The issue there is being framed as civilian vs. military, with the subtext being a concern that Hayden would support or fail to fight the slide of authority to the spook shops in the Pentagon. While that's a very valid concern, it darned odd to see the GOP raising it now. Although they may have woken up to the danger that Rumsfeld is no longer in full command of his faculties, as a long-run matter they have no beef with the Pentagon. Yes, the military intel people winning the turf wars are Neo-Cons rather than paleoconservatives, and yes, they're not the brightest bulbs, and yes, the CIA was the traditional fief of the Yale establishment conservative, but even so. It's hard to tell who's serious and who is being disingenuous here. Interestingly, however, today the spinners suggest that Hayden will be an anti-Rumsfeld appointment -- although the bureaucratic horse may have already bolted.

Now consider the odd position that the Democrats find themselves in. The CIA has been known to be dangerous and stupid for going on 20 years. The NSA were the smart guys (and, until recently, we thought the straight-and-narrow guys too); the CIA were the loose cannons and the B/C+ students. The quality of the analysis during the cold war tended to be rather low, and the quality of the covert missions spotty at best, and quite dire at worst. So no great love lost there. Plus, as a matter of democratic theory, Democrats at least as much as Republicans are wired to want firm civilian control of the spooks, especially the covert action branch. The Church Commission would never have happened in a Republican Senate.

But recently the CIA has been at war with the administration. Part of it is a CYA exercise over WMDs. Part of it the Plame outing. Part of it probably has to do with the CIA's fear of prosecution for its killings, torture, renditions, and illegal activities on foreign soil, including several of our closest allies. On the one hand, Democrats are not in favor of rogue spies leaking to undermine their civilian masters. On the other hand, the Democrats are not for fake or cherry-picked or stovepiped intelligence, unnecessary wars, torture, outing agents, or George Bush. (Alas, the party is more split on the question of prosecuting criminal agents.) So it's hard to figure out who to root for. Plus Democrats tend to like it when Republicans nominate technocrats -- so long as they don't seem like closet partisans; after all it tends to better outcomes than the standard practice of appointing unqualified open partisans, even when they are not caught up in sex scandals and money scandals. Thus, I'm afraid that Democrats will find it very hard to unite on this one, even given Hayden's somewhat troubling statements about surveillance.

One would think, hope, that Hayden's involvement in the NSA's illegal wiretaps would suffice to make him unconfirmable. But the technocratic allure may yet carry the day, which is sort of sad, but not incomprehensible when the alternative -- total ineptitude -- is so dangerous and costly.

J. Edgar Would Be Proud

J. Edgar Hoover would be proud,

TPM Muckraker: This morning's newspapers are ablaze with the outrageous news that the FBI was trying to get its hands on over 200 boxes of files once belonging to legendary investigative journalist Jack Anderson.

What the papers didn't report was the truly ugly extent to which the bureau has gone to achieve their goal -- such as manipulating Anderson's elderly widow to sign a document she apparently didn't understand.

The rest of us should be ashamed.

Might I add that the administration's novel legal theory here is that it is illegal for any of us to possess a classified document.

How long until we see the first sting operations against reporters in which a "source" offers to pass them secret documents and then the FBI swoops down on them?

Let's Hear it for the Archivist

Secrecy News reports that the current Archivist of the United States is not only distancing himself from the secret re-classifications of his predecessor, but he's saying good stuff,

The resulting firestorm of criticism that has been directed at the National Archives is "absolutely fair," said Archivist Weinstein in a meeting with historians and public interest groups today.

He took responsibility for the affair (which originated prior to his appointment as Archivist). More significantly, he repudiated the underlying practice.

"There can never be a classified aspect to our mission," Weinstein said. "Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being."

"If records must be removed for reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when it occurs and how many records are affected."

Yay!

(Previous post on the re-classification of public materials: No Institution Left Behind.)

Halle and Farewell

Caroline writes,

I was stunned to read today that the Halle Orchestra, founded in 1858 and based in my home town (city) of Manchester, has canceled a planned US tour because it decided that the enormous cost of obtaining visas (because of lost work days due to the need to visit the US embassy in London for personal interviews) meant that the visit was not sensible from an economic point of view. I have heard similar stories about academics deciding not to try to come to the US because it is too complicated.

Manchester is four to five hours from London. And these same musicians could have tourist visas without question and without interviews. But if they're going to play for us (which I suppose involved some payment somewhere), they each have to have personal interviews.

And these idiotic visa policies make us better off how exactly?

Decreasingly Hypothetical Questions

Here are three genuine, not utterly hypothetical, questions inspired by the revelation that Libby fingered Cheney as the person who instructed him to leak information from a National Intelligence Estimate hyping Iraq's supposed efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. I really don't know the answers; all I have are guesses at best.

1. Does Vice-President Cheney have the legal authority to declassify material single-handedly?
2. And even if he does, if Cheney proved also to be the source of an instruction to leak information about Valerie Plame, does his legal authority extend to the exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent?
3. And if the answer to either question above is "no" does that amount to an impeachable offense?

My guesses--and they are only guesses--below. Make your own before peeking.

1. Does Vice-President Cheney have the legal authority to declassify material? I am certain that there is nothing inherent in the office of the Vice-Presidency that includes the authority to declassify information. (Conversely, I can imagine arguments that such authority might be an inherent Presidential power; I would also expect that there are such statutory powers.) I also rather doubt that there is any legislation giving him this power, although I don't actually know whether this is the case. I do know, however, that Presidents frequently delegate powers to the Veep, or appoint them to various administrative roles, e.g. chairs of intra-governmental committees, and it's entirely possible that one or more of these roles carries declassification authority. [Note also that the Washington Post article is careful to state that parts of the report had been declassified, so it's not certain that the leak actually included classified material.]

2. And even if he does, does this extend to the exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent? The Post article doesn't directly tie Cheney to ordering the Plame outing, but it's quite suggestive. Suppose, hypothetically, that further testimony ties him to the Plame leak more directly. Even if Cheney has the power to declassify documents, it doesn't follow that this includes the power to 'out' a covert agent, as those identities are jealously protected by a special statute. Furthermore, even if one argues via far-out theories like the unitary executive that the President has inherent authority to violate statutes that might restrict his speech -- and the argument is not wholly fanciful -- I fail to see how an argument premised on the unitary and unique role of the President should also encompass the vice-president. (Although in fairness I should note that the D.C. Circuit and to a lesser extent the Supreme Court flirted with the idea that the Veep enjoys some sort of derivative Presidential powers and immunities in the recent dust-up over access to Cheney's energy task force's records.)

3. And if the answer to either question above is "no" does that amount to an impeachable offense? For the straightforward leak of the NIE, I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no': So much stuff is classified that should not be; leaking it is a very standard part of DC culture; leaks even those with an agenda also often serve the public interest as they add information to the public debate. While technically this might be a serious crime, my instinct is that absent some special circumstances in which the information was actually particularly harmful to 'sources and methods' or other grave national interests when released a mere leak is not the sort of action for which impeachment is the politically, morally, or precedentially appropriate remedy. (Of course if some prosecutor wants to conduct a leak inquiry, that's fine with me.)

That doesn't mean I think that taking us to war on false pretenses might not be an impeachable offense. It just means that technical violations of the classification rules by leaking information of no great value to our enemies ought not to rise to that level on their own.

But the Plame leak is a much trickier issue. If it proved to be the case that Cheney ordered the outing of Plame without authority and with the knowledge that she was a covert operative then I think given that Congress has made clear by statute that this is a special circumstance, this leak does rise to the sort of 'high crime' that is an impeachable offense. It was something that directly weakened the US by exposing an agent, ruining her value to the CIA and also her career, and it was done for vile, partisan purposes, perhaps even in part as personal payback. [I also think Congress has the constitutional right to ignore impeachable offenses, so no duty arises from this.]

But suppose that the defense is that Cheney didn't know she was covert, a defense frequently raised in the media in relation to other suspects in the Plame case. Then I'm not so sure. Here we have a combination the intent to engage in garden-variety leaking combined with a negligent failure to find out the real facts. Bad. Very bad. But impeachable? I'm just not sure, and I suspect in case of doubt one probably shouldn't go forward.

Again, these are guesses, at most tentative, and not the product of research. More facts, research or thought that might produce a better more considered answer.

Values Clarification

Miami Herald, Groups unite to defy military recruiting efforts,

Over the last five years, schools such as Central, which is in a lower-income area, saw twice as many military recruiters as college recruiters.

I don't begrudge the military the chance to recruit (as long as there's no trickery); indeed, I'm still waiting for GW Bush to make a nationally televised speech banging the drum. But wouldn't it be nice if we as a society were as assiduous about promoting education as a means of upward mobility.

Of course, once upon a time, state college tuition was almost free; now it's much more expensive (Update: here are some stats on declining public funding of community colleges). And we're making loans more difficult too.

I suppose it helps military recruiting....

Time to Think the Unthinkable

It used to be that having the NSA spy domestically was one of the unthinkable acts that one believed administrations understood were out of bounds. Sort of like the indefinite detention of US citizens in military prisons, or the torturing and killing of prisoners, or 'rendering' them to countries that torture.

Well, all bets, gloves, illusions are off.

It is time, therefore, to start asking if this administration is doing other things that were previously 'unthinkable'.

Today brings suggestions that the administration spied on one or more journalists, and perhaps also on an occasional Democratic candidate and party operative. But don't stop there. For example, someone should ask whether the new 'anything goes without a warrant if it's important enough' standard for snooping extends to tax returns and to census data. It's hard, after all, to imagine a legal theory that would allow the NSA to ignore FISA that would not also apply to all that delicious data just sitting there, even if it is hedged with statutory protections. That's just Congress, after all, nothing serious.

Suggestions for other previously unthinkable questions that should be asked -- not that we can trust any statement we get from this administration -- painfully welcomed.

More Illegality & Cover-up at the FBI

Not only did the FBI bungle a terrorism investigation and drive the whistle-blower out of the agency, but the FBI is unable to determine who among its staff falsified a report with correction fluid. Is this incompetence, or willful ignorance, and does either answer mean anything less than a thorough house-cleaning is in order? (I mean, wouldn't SOP be to polygraph the lot of them?)

Report Finds Cover-Up in an F.B.I. Terror Case - New York Times: Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents in the case in an effort to cover repeated missteps and retaliated against an agent who first complained about the problems, Justice Department investigators have concluded.

In one instance, someone altered dates on three F.B.I. forms using correction fluid to conceal an apparent violation of federal wiretap law, according to a draft report of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general's office obtained by The New York Times. But investigators were unable to determine who altered the documents.

Big Lies

Marty Schwimmer is not a happy camper: The government has been lying to him. (It's not about the Plame affair despite the title)

William Arkin Pulls No Punches

William Arkin, pungently:

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers retired this week as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and received the usual platitudes from the President and others about his leadership of the military since September 2001. He's off to Kansas State University in his home state, according to some reports with a possible role with the school's Institute for Military History and 20th Century Studies. I'm not sure I could say, as a watcher of Myers for five years, what unique contribution he's made, or what philosophy he holds about military matters, or even what he has contributed. Two memories stick in my head: Myers' vociferous defense of the Iraq war plan -- he's not known for public expressions of emotion -- after others criticized the size of the U.S. ground force early in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The other memory is one of Myers standing next to or behind President Bush at various White House and Crawford events that just happened to occur during the 2004 Presidential campaign. His appearance in uniform with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell suggested that he was some kind of political appointee, and that the military somehow endorsed the President is his campaigning mode. Maybe the new Chairman could be a little more mindful of the fact that he is a military advisor to the President and not a member of the administration.

Arkin certainly calls 'em like I see 'em.

In fact, this Early Warning by William M. Arkin blog that the Washington Post is running reminds me why I read newspapers.

Except. Wait. You can't read Arkin's blog in your newspaper. It's only at Washingtonpost.com. (Kinda like this.) As Jay Rosen notes, Washingtonpost.com is much livelier than the online offering by the NYT. Plus the print NYT has other problems too these days.

News You didn't Read Last Week

The biggest US domestic news you didn't hear last week was that the Pentagon has decided to pour $50 billion -- maybe 20% of the money needed to rebuild New Orleans -- down a rat hole. Having already spent $19 billion over twenty years to build a prototype that doesn't work, the Pentagon is planning to start "full rate production" of the Opsrey V-22 tilt rotor aircarft. Unofficial estimated cost of the 458 craft planned? $100 million each, for a total just under $50 billion -- plus inflation, cost-overruns, and the usual.

And the @#$$#@ of it is, the V-22 doesn't work--if exposed to dirt. I'm told, however, that dirt is sometimes found in the places one might want to land it.

Adding insult to injury, the contractors ran an offensive anti-Muslim ad promoting the V-22, which incidentally shows an artist's conception of the plane doing what it was originally intended to do, but can't.

The good folks at the Project on Government Oversight are all over it at the POGO Blog.

[timestamp corrected]

Black Helicopter Contingency Plans

Seth Edenbaum points us to Granite Shadow, an expose by the Washington Post's William Arkin, inaugurating a very promising new blog, Early Warning. One the one hand, it's obviously good to have the federal government do disaster planning. On the other hand, having an off-the-shelf plan in place for a military takeover is not one of your warm and fuzzy developments.

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com: Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.

A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.

That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 0400 is a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that serves as the umbrella for military efforts to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It has extensively been updated and revised since 9/11.

Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.

...

My guess is that Power Geyser and CONPLAN 0300 refers to operations in support of a civil agency "lead"(most likely the Attorney General for a WMD attack) while Granite Shadow and CONPLAN 0400 lays out contingencies where the military is in the lead.  I'll wait to be corrected by someone in the know.

Both plans seem to live behind a veil of extraordinary secrecy because military forces operating under them have already been given a series of ''special authorities'' by the President and the secretary of defense. These special authorities include, presumably, military roles in civilian law enforcement and abrogation of State's powers in a declared or perceived emergency.

This sort of contingency plan may have a place, indeed probably has a place, but only in the context of carefully crafted legislation which spells out the circumstances under which the emergency plan can be activated -- and more importantly sets out the ways in which the emergency authority will end. (Was it really Robert Heinlein -- and not someone more like or Machiavelli or de Tocqueville -- who first said "There is nothing so permanent as a temporary emergency"?)

For the executive branch to draft secret plans for a military takeover of government, however laudable the motives and however extreme the circumstances for which they are intended, does not in the end best serve our long-term national interests.

1984: We're Behind Schedule

The first time I skimmed an online article about this Soviet-style poster that is now found on DC area trains, I thought it was a parody:

But it’s real — or is it?

Wayne Madsen on the NSA Again

Wayne Madsen has another NSA leak that I really hope isn’t true: NSA intercepts for Bolton masked as ‘training missions’:

According to National Security Agency insiders, outgoing NSA Director General Michael Hayden approved special communications intercepts of phone conversations made by past and present U.S. government officials. The intercepts are at the height of the current controversy surrounding the nomination of Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.

It was revealed by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) during Bolton’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee nomination hearing that Bolton requested transcripts of 10 NSA intercepts of conversations between named U.S. government officials and foreign persons. However, NSA insiders report that Hayden approved special intercept operations on behalf of Bolton and had them masked as “training missions” in order to get around internal NSA regulations that normally prohibit such eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

Is it easier to believe that life is imitating “Enemy of the State,” or that NSA sources are workig to discredit Madsen by feeding him false info?

Two Sets of Leaks from the NSA

Speaking of the NSA, here are links to two stories about the NSA.

• James Ridgeway, Village Voice, Intelligence Whistleblower Canned
• Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, The unholy trinity of electronic snooping: Bolton, Negroponte and Hayden

There’s stuff in the Wayne Masden article that seems all too plausible. And, as is so often the case, there’s also some seriously tinfoily stuff in Madsen’s report, notably the allegation that,

NSA has recorded tactical communications intelligence—overheard on a speaker system in the NSOC—that demonstrates that United Flight 93 was shot down by U.S. fighter planes over Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration concocted a phony “patriotic” cover story about the passengers and crew deliberately crashing the plane into the ground.

I am very dubious. I just don’t think they could keep something that big under wraps so long. Consider how quickly the tissue of lies about the ‘friendly fire’ killing of Pat Tilman began to unravel. I suppose you could argue that if it took a year for the whole story to come out on a minor thing like that, a really major cover up would last longer. But surely someone would have talked?

From the 'Security Theater' Files

[IP] More Baggage Taboos, but Little Security Enhancement:

Everybody has a favorite story from what I think of as the T.S.A. Follies. Here’s mine. A uniformed pilot waits impatiently at a checkpoint for 10 minutes while two screeners from the Transportation Security Administration scrutinize every item in his carry-on bag. After he was allowed to go on his way, he explained why it took so long. “They told me they had to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything that would allow me to take over an airplane,” he said, rolling his eyes

CIA Stonewalls on Its Relations With Nazis

Here’s a example of why, when the CIA squares off with its sleazy and dangerous new Director, Porter Goss, I find two sides I can root happily against.

C.I.A. Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files: For nearly three years, the C.I.A. has interpreted the 1998 law narrowly and rebuffed requests for additional records, say Congressional officials and some members of the working group, who also contend that that stance seems to violate the law.

These officials say the agency has sometimes agreed to provide information about former Nazis, but not about the extent of the agency’s dealings with them after World War II. In other cases, it has refused to provide information about individuals and their conduct during the war unless the working group can first provide evidence that they were complicit in war crimes. …

“I think that the C.I.A. has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and a member of the group. “We have bent over backward; we have given them every opportunity to comply.” …

“I can only say that the posture the C.I.A. has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that’s not a position we can accept,” Mr. Ben-Veniste said. In a separate interview, [former prosecutor Thomas H.] Baer said: “Too much has been secret for too long. The C.I.A. has not complied with the statute.”

Hard to imagine how releasing this info could harm national security today. But it might not look so good for the CIA.

Update on TSA Metastasizing

Update to TSA Metastasizing, the item on American Airlines demanding intrusive personal info from EFF’s Cory Doctorow at Heathrow, and then being unable to explain why they wanted it or how they would keep: Ryan Singel writes to AA and gets a reply. Trouble is, as Cory Doctorow explains, it’s a pretty weaselly reply.

Homeland Security At Work

Cryptome has obtained and put on line Homeland Security Operations Morning Briefs - 27 September 2004 to 14 January 2005 (“FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY”). They detail a large number of security incidents ranging from the potentially serious to the puzzling or picayune.

Terror Warnings Used to Scare Electorate Now Inoperative

As Jan. 20 Nears, Terror Warnings Drop: In April, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that al Qaeda terrorists might strike during this week’s presidential inauguration festivities in Washington. The warning was part of a drumbeat sounded by U.S. officials throughout 2004 that terrorists were seeking to launch attacks both during and after the election season.

Nine months later, the threat level has been lowered, and Ridge, speaking at a news conference last week, said there is no evidence of a plot to disrupt President Bush’s inauguration. Previous warnings, Ridge explained, stemmed from threat reports tied to the elections — not to the inauguration more than two months later.

In other words, we lied to you then, and now we’re lying to you about what we said then. And by the way Social Security is in crisis, and we’re not thinking about invading Iran.

Bush Team Fights To Protect CIA Right to Torture

Waterboarding is torture. And the Administration wants to ensure that the CIA can keep doing it and its ilk.

White House Fought New Curbs on Interrogations, Officials Say: At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret detention and interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after the White House expressed opposition.

I suppose this answers the question ‘Why isn’t Congress doing something about the torture issue?’ — the answer is ‘Because Bush & Co are working hard to prevent it.’

Is there no one who will filibuster Gonzales — as a fundamental moral issue — by reading all the Pentagon (and FBI) reports on torture into the record? And the photos. And the secret photos and movies, which could be placed on the public record under Congressional privilege . (The latter may be asking too much; although Senators are Constitutionally protected from prosecution from declassifying material when they speak on the floor of the Senate, the consequence would be to lose the clearance that allows them future access to such materials. It might still be worth it.)

Update: Marty Lederman’s reaction to this NYT article makes a number of important points including:

• The story confirms the hypothesis that he and I have both been pushing, that one of the engines driving the torture memos was a need to either legitimate, or at least fail to repudiate, ongoing CIA practices
• Once you allow waterboarding by the CIA against foreign persons held secretly abroad, it’s not going to be limited to ‘top terrorist leaders’ but rather, “It’s somewhat unrealistic to hope that the policy will not as a practical matter have ramifications far beyond the class of persons for whom the policy was designed.”
• This Administration has talked a great deal about how it is committed to treating detainees “humanely,” but all the while it has fought tooth and nail to be able to treat detainees inhumanely, i.e., in a manner that would be unconstitutional if done in the U.S.
• We’d all be better off if these issues were debated openly rather than having these fundamental moral choices — with, one may add, significant anti-US propaganda implications — made in the dark.

Stranger Than Demented Conspiracy Theories

Ken MacLeod, the wondrous science fiction writer, unearths something beyond the imagination of a lesser science fiction writer. In fact it’s so demented that, given the source, I had some doubts as it its plausibility. But there it is:

The Early Days of a Better Nation: Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it’s all a ridiculous hoax? Don’t worry. It’s meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax. According to American leftist James Petras’s review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders,

[the]CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an “anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism” (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as “free enterprise painting.”) Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe’s most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

So the whole hegemony of boring decadent rubbish art that has been inflicted on us for fifty years, from Jackson bloody Pollock to Damien fucking Hirst, has all along been a CIA plot.

Never could quite see the point of Robert Motherwell myself. This is certainly the most close-to-rational account I ever heard.

MacLeod’s coda is biting:

Socialist Realist art now commands higher prices than that of the dissidents and the Western-imitative official art of perestroika. The market has taken an ironic revenge on its votaries.

How to Do Sarcasm

First Draft takes this quote from Tom Ridge:

Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that the government should reconsider how it warns people about security threats, saying that its color-coded scale has invited “questions and even occasional derision.”

And destroys it .

Inside the TSA at MIA

This account of the goings-on at the MIA TSA branch, brought to you by the feisty local Miami New Times, is worse than not pretty. It’s pretty ugly: allegations of theft from passengers’ bags, sexual harassment (of other TSA employees), massive featherbedding, internal racism, and general incompetence.

Your Safety, Their Punch Line: Internal mistakes and misjudgments in day-to-day operations are even harder to root out, since the rare fool employee who might criticize, even constructively, is immediately dispatched. From the TSA’s earliest days, screeners have complained of ongoing breaches of security at their workplaces, the result of improper inspection procedures. I know of several instances, both here and at other airports, in which the employees responsible for violations were never corrected or reprimanded. But the whistleblowers — who committed the unpardonable sin of not just telling the truth, but of telling the truth about bosses or co-workers — were fired. Some have also asserted that in the weeks leading up to their dismissals, their personnel files suddenly began bristling with fabricated documentation of inappropriate or illegal activities.

Repressing criticism might be a way of streamlining operations, but it conceals security problems that sooner or later, one way or another, will be revealed. Even the greenest screener at MIA knows that an alert terrorist would have little trouble slipping past a checkpoint. And passing through deadly objects? Child’s play. That’s partly because humans err, but also because TSA rewards those who can look efficient and do nothing, all the while punishing honesty and diligence, which can complicate things. I have to keep reminding myself: TSA management is motivated by priorities that have nothing to do with our job performance.

…

Teeming with sexual intrigue and power plays, TSA is more dating service than disciplined “security administration.” So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised this past week to hear a manager cryptically refer to some “investigation” of TSA employees who’ve allegedly been offering money to airline employees in exchange for “sexual favors,” or of the departure of two more top managers, Paul Diener and William Morrison, owing to allegations of sexual harassment.

…

One screener describes her checkpoint: “There’s a group who’s always standing around talking or going on breaks whenever it’s their time to [do certain tasks]. So a few screeners end up doing everything. Whenever we complain to supervisors, they say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll have to talk to him or her.’ But then nothing changes. … Nobody complains anymore — we just have to accept it.”

I’ve heard some screeners boast of purposely making mistakes on tasks they hate so they’ll be taken off those jobs. Instead of ordering them to shape up, their superiors generally let them go back to standing around. A few months ago at one of our periodic Town Hall meetings, I was surprised to hear an offhand remark by FSD Richard Thomas (who must be praised for holding Town Hall meetings in the first place, even though everyone is too scared to tell him anything of substance). Thomas said Washington had authorized him to hire additional screeners but that he really needs to fill even more positions — “to take into account the sick and the lazy.”

…

Prosecutors had a flimsy case against Washington because TSA officials purportedly delayed and bungled a sting operation that should have been taken over by the FBI from the first day TSA learned of a possible theft ring. People on the scene told me that about three weeks before the arrests, a few screeners found the nerve to report that not just two but seven or eight of their co-workers had been stealing from suitcases for months.

The songbirds were told to carry on as usual and to ignore the plundering. TSA officials dallied for weeks while passengers continued to be ripped off. Finally the Miami-Dade Police Department airport detail came up with videotape of the ramp workers, and on June 23 officers swooped in. But why only two arrests? …

It’s hard to figure how many screeners at MIA have actually been caught with diamond-studded watches or gold chains stuffed into their shirts or pants. Many times the screener will be fired but not arrested. “The TSA people usually tell us they prefer to handle it administratively,” says one Miami-Dade police officer stationed at the airport.

Kerik Has A Nanny Problem

Kerik Withdraws Name for Homeland Security Chief.

Does that mean we can expect the original to replace the copy? He did, after all, say,

We only see the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do.

Sounds like just the guy to run the Ministry of Internal Security in this administration.

Name the Country that Abuses Psychiatry to Silence Dissidents

One of the many horrifying things about the old Soviet Union was the use of psychiatry to silence dissidents. Anyone who dared suggest that the country wasn’t a workers’ paradise clearly had lost their grip on reality, right?

Fortunately, nothing like that could ever happen here, say to someone who claims that US troops torture captives.

Um.

Annals of Stupidity Dept

[IP] Latest in Security: This just in from BBC.

BBC World Service just told us that French airport security forces, in a security exercise to train and/or test explosive-sniffing dogs, planted plastic explosives in random pieces of real outgoing luggage, intending of course to remove them all before they were loaded on planes.

Unfortunately one of those pieces of luggage got away. French airport security has sent out an all-points alert to the world’s airports that an unsuspecting passenger is carrying explosives he or she knows nothing about.

The luggage is blue.

Just amazingly dumb.

TSA Is Losing Its Grip (Or Overusing It)

My personal experiences with TSA vary from great to OK, and tend to be much better than my often not real good experiences with private cops doing airport security.

It seems, though, that other people are having bad experiences and terrible experiences with the TSA at the airport. Add this to the new pro-groping policy (“I’m from the government and I’m here to feel you up”?), plans for nude screening and the scene is set for popular push back against this multi-multi-million dollar exercise in bolting barn doors long after the entire menagerie has bolted.

CIA Under Goss: Train Wreck in the Making

In Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA, the Washington Post gives us a peek at the train wreck in the making at the CIA.

It’s obvious that Bush has nominated a partisan hack. He brought with him four aides, people I don’t know much about, but whom the CIA people depict as having much to be modest about.

I wish I could stop there, and just pen another Bush-administration-incompetence story (which this seems to be), but it’s more complicated than that. I actually think that a significant fraction of what Goss says is wrong with the CIA is likely to be right.

The problems at the CIA are pervasive. They start with a general lack of brilliance among the people who’ve been promoted in the agency. They run through bloat and hide-bound ways of work. The agency never recovered from the last purge, so it lacks ‘assets’ in key parts of the world, and is still shaking off its cold-war-centered focus. The CIA tortures people, which is no trivial matter.

Thus, even though it was politically expedient I have not been real comfortable with the war between the spooks at the Agency and their nominal political masters. It’s never good when the secret police or the get into politics.

The agency is a serious mess and nowhere more than the dark side, the clandestine service. It needs a cleanup; it’s just not at all likely that the ham-handed methods being used by Goss and his merry henchmen are likely to improve matters much. They might even make things worse.

There Is A Limit to What People Will Do in the Name of Security

Having just done a lot of airporting, and removed my non-metalic sneakers to get through the security theater at National, I’m pleased to learn that there is a limit to the amount of nudity that people will tolerate in the name of security that and that people in the US are resisting the airport equivalent of x-ray specs. (spotted via W. David Stephenson)

I actually had a great picture produced by the promoters of a very similar device that I wanted to publish in my Death of Privacy? article, but they refused to give me permission to use it, and even took it off line shortly after I enquired about it.

Boom Goes the Last Shred of Bush's Reputation as a Terrorism-Fighter

The New York Times has more details about this stunning piece of incompetence in the keystone kops war on terror.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. “This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk,”