Category Archives: National Security

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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