Ken Novak: Current events

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:33:20 GMT

Reverse Foreign Aid: Important issues with incomplete explanation. "According to the United Nations, in 2006 the net transfer of capital from poorer countries to rich ones was $784 billion, up from $229 billion in 2002. (In 1997, the balance was even.)" Reasons:

Since 1990, the world’s nonrich nations have increased their reserves, on average, from around three months’ worth of imports to more than eight months’ worth — or the equivalent of about 30 percent of their G.D.P. China and other countries maintain those reserves mainly in the form of supersecure U.S. Treasury bills.. But the problem is that T-bills earn low returns. All the money spent on T-bills — a very substantial sum — could be earning far better returns invested elsewhere, or could be used to pay teachers and build highways at home, activities that bring returns of a different type. Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, estimates conservatively that maintaining reserves in excess of the three-month standard costs poor countries 1 percent of their economies annually — some $110 billion every year. Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist, says he thinks the real cost could be double that.
As poorer countries enter the W.T.O., they must agree to pay royalties on [intellectual property] — and a result is a net obligation of more than $40 billion annually that poorer countries owe to American and European corporations.
The hypercompetition for global investment has produced another important reverse subsidy: the tax holidays poor countries offer foreign investors... Since deals between corporations and governments are usually secret, it is hard to know how much investment incentives cost poorer countries — certainly tens of billions of dollars. Whatever the cost, it is growing, as country after country has passed laws enabling the offer of such incentives.
The migration of highly educated people from poor nations is increasing. A small brain drain can benefit the South, as emigrants send money home and may return with new skills and capital. But in places where educated people are few and emigrants don’t go home again, the brain drain devastates. .. The financial consequences for the poorer nations can be severe. A doctor who moves from Johannesburg to North Dakota costs the South African government as much as $100,000, the price of training him there. ..
Most costly to poor countries, they have been drafted into paying for rich nations’ energy use. On a per capita basis, Americans .. create more global warming — than anyone else. .. American energy use is being subsidized by tropical coastal nations, who appear to be global warming’s first victims."

Reasons 1-3 add up to less than $300B of today's $784B. Reason 4 has been happening ever since decolonization, and is substantially offset by remittances from the migrant home. Reason 5 is not monetized today. So the substantial majority of the amount is unexplained -- esp by comparison to 2002, when it was one third the size. What changed so drastically? Does this figure include China's net exports, and their policy of incredibly high foreign exchange holdings, inflating the entire issue?

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:11:49 GMT

A World Free of Nuclear Weapons: Long op-ed by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn on both urgent and long-term measures to cut the nuclear threat. Meanwhile, US policy is going the other way: see U.S. Selecting Hybrid Design For Warheads and Complex 2030: DOE's Misguided Plan to Rebuild the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 08:01:04 GMT

Dollar going down: Mini-fact: Dollar down by 30% in last 5 years. "The United States dollar index, a measure of the dollar’s strength against a basket of currencies, fell to 83.23 from 83.65 on Friday. In February 2002, the index was at 120."

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:30:13 GMT

FT.com - Richest 2% hold half the world's assets: "Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth .. according to the data from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider). ..

Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, [and] to belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved. So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use.

Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia. While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth. The concentration of wealth in different countries varies considerably, with the top 10 per cent in the US holding 70 per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with 61 per cent in France, 56 per cent in the UK, 44 per cent in Germany and 39 per cent in Japan."

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:24:52 GMT

Global Voices Online: Interesting compilation of current blog material from citizens of many counties, including Lebanon, Libya, China, Iran, with coverage of local news. Would provide interesting inputs to the "open source intelligence" movement.

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 15:16:57 GMT

Dealing with Tehran: Assessing U.S. Diplomatic Options Toward Iran by former CIA official Flynt L. Leverett, The Century Foundation, 12/4/2006. An op-ed version of this was blocked from publication by the CIA. It "lays out the essential features of a U.S.-Iranian grand bargain. If Washington does not begin to pursue such an arrangement vigorously and soon, the window for this kind of strategic understanding between the United States and the Islamic Republic is likely to close. Under these circumstances, Iran’s development of at least a nuclear weapons option in the next few years is highly likely.

Thus, if it does not pursue a grand bargain with Tehran, the United States almost certainly will have to take up the more daunting and less potentially satisfying challenges of coping with a nuclear-capable Iran. And the standing of the United States in the world’s most strategically critical region will continue its already disturbing decline." See also commentary from Newsweek's James Dickey.

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:21:00 GMT

Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker: "The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province. .. The Marines recently filed an updated version of [the August] assessment that stood by its conclusions ..

The report describes Iraq's Sunni minority as "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital. .. True or not, the memo says, "from the Sunni perspective, their greatest fears have been realized: Iran controls Baghdad and Anbaris have been marginalized." Moreover, most Sunnis now believe it would be unwise to count on or help U.S. forces because they are seen as likely to leave the country before imposing stability.

Between al-Qaeda's violence, Iran's influence and an expected U.S. drawdown, "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" that U.S. and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar," the assessment found. .. "Despite the success of the December elections, nearly all government institutions from the village to provincial levels have disintegrated or have been thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq," or a smattering of other insurgent groups, the report says"

From the story on the August report: "One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost." .. One possible solution would be to try to turn over the province to Iraqi forces, but that could increase the risk of a full-blown civil war. Shiite-dominated forces might begin slaughtering Sunnis, while Sunni-dominated units might simply begin acting independently of the central government."

The more recent story has a video shows Post correspondent Thomas Ricks reporting on an option circulating in the Pentagon to simply side with the Shiites and encourage formation of a large national Shiite-Kurdish army to restore order. This might reduce the importance of Shiite radicals like Al Sadr. Nothing is said in that report about the subsequent fate of the Sunnis in that scenario.

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:04:41 GMT

The Election Is in the Mail: In the 2006 election, "there was one state where all went well: Oregon, where everyone votes by mail. Since Oregon adopted Vote by Mail as its sole voting option in 1998, the state’s turnout has increased, concerns about fraud have decreased, a complete paper trail exists for every election, recounts are non-controvertible and both major political parties have gained voters. Moreover, in doing away with voting machines, polling booths, precinct captains and election workers, the state estimates that it saves up to 40 percent over the cost of a traditional election. ..

[If this was nationwide,] the country’s 35,000 post offices could provide information, distribute and collect voting materials and issue inexpensive residency and address identifications for voting purposes. Perhaps most important, given the concerns about voting machine security, mail ballots cannot be hacked. Tampering or interfering with mail is a federal crime, and the United States Postal Service has its own law enforcement arm, which works closely with a variety of enforcement authorities including the F.B.I. Trained election clerks can take the time to check signatures without delaying or discouraging voters. And the advantages of a paper trail outshine the glitter of black box electronic gadgetry.

Already, in order to help businesses that send out big mailings, the Postal Service uses bar-code scanning to inexpensively track large volumes of mail from origin to destination. With minor but careful modifications, this technology can be adapted for use with ballots — allowing voters to check on their location and status by entering a tracking number on the Internet or by phone."

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 07:11:15 GMT

Carbonfund.org has a national marketing partner: Good to see that they are reaching larger audiences through partnerships. In this case, Working Assets is not only advertising to their membership, but offering a matching grant of approximately 25%.

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 07:08:13 GMT

The Young and the Generous: A Study of $100 Million in On-line Giving:
"On September 3, 2006, Network for Good processed its 100 millionth dollar in [online] charitable donations. .. The median age of donors at Network for Good is 38, .. significantly younger than off-line donors, who tend to be 60+ according to most studies. .. Whether due to income levels, the impulsive nature of on-line giving, or the credit card effect, on-line donors give significantly more than off-line donors.

About 40 percent of giving through Network for Good was in December, when, just as off-line donors, on-line donors do most of their giving because of the holidays and the end of the tax year. About 30 percent of giving was in response to disasters. ..

At times of disaster, donors tend to give to large, familiar organizations such as the American Red Cross and Salvation Army. But when humanitarian crises are removed from the equation, it is clear that smaller organizations play a big role in on-line giving. This is not the case off-line. In the nonprofit sector, a small number of large organizations (in terms of annual revenue) account for 1 percent of the organizations but the lion's share of charitable giving. But at a giving portal such as Network for Good, where donors can choose from more than one million charitable organizations, smaller organizations benefit. Similar to the long tail phenomenon at Amazon, where bestsellers may sell many copies but not as many as the sum total of niche titles, Network for Good found that most giving goes to smaller, "niche organizations" rather than big-name organizations."

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 07:45:18 GMT

Russia Led Arms Sales to Developing World in 2005: "The Russian sales in 2005 included 29 of the SA-15 Gauntlet surface-to-air missile systems for Iran; Russia also signed deals to upgrade Iran’s Su-24 bombers and MIG-29 fighter aircraft, as well as its T-72 battle tanks. “For a period of time, in the mid-1990s, the Russian government agreed not to make new advanced weapons sales to the Iran government,” wrote Richard F. Grimmett, author of the study by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. “That agreement has since been rescinded by Russia." ..

In 2005, the United States led in total arms transfer agreements, when deals to both developed and developing nations are combined. The total was $12.8 billion, down from $13.2 billion in 2004. France ranked second in total sales, with $7.9 billion, up from $2.2 billion in 2004. Russia was third when sales to developing and developed nations were combined, with $7.4 billion, up from $5.6 billion in 2004. ..

Russia’s arms agreements with the developing world totaled $7 billion in 2005, an increase from its $5.4 billion in sales in 2004. That figure surpassed the United States’ annual sales agreements to the developing world for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. France ranked second in arms transfer agreements to developing nations, with $6.3 billion, and the United States was third, with $6.2 billion. The leading buyer in the developing world in 2005 was India, with $5.4 billion in weapons purchases, followed by Saudi Arabia with $3.4 billion and China with $2.8 billion. The total value of all arms sales deals worldwide, when counting both developing and developed nations, in 2005 was $44.2 billion."

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 07:18:06 GMT

Uranium moved from Poland to Russia: "The International Atomic Energy Agency secretly completed the removal of 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a nuclear reactor near Warsaw on Wednesday and transferred the material to a secure site in Russia for disposal, according to an IAEA document. The operation is part of an ongoing effort by American and United Nations officials to secure and recover high-risk nuclear and radiological materials around the world. Similar operations over the past three years have returned material from Libya, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan to Russia, where it was first made during the Soviet era.

The IAEA wants to reduce the number of reactors around the world that still use weapons-grade uranium. The agency says that more than 100 are still in operation, including in the United States, China and India, though numbers are concentrated in Eastern and Central Europe. It wants them converted to use low-enriched uranium and to eliminate the commerce in highly enriched uranium for research reactors."

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:34:27 GMT

Some Convenient Truths: Short piece by Gregg Easterbrook that explains the optimism I feel on the technology of global warming. "Most progress against air pollution has been cheaper than expected. Smog controls on automobiles, for example, were predicted to cost thousands of dollars for each vehicle. Today’s new cars emit less than 2 percent as much smog-forming pollution as the cars of 1970, and the cars are still as affordable today as they were then. Acid-rain control has cost about 10 percent of what was predicted in 1990, when Congress enacted new rules. At that time, opponents said the regulations would cause a “clean-air recession”; instead, the economy boomed. ..
Emissions of CFCs have been nearly eliminated, and studies suggest that ozone-layer replenishment is beginning. ..

[Why the pessimism on cutting GHG?] the success of previous antipollution efforts remains something of a secret. Polls show that Americans think the air is getting dirtier, not cleaner .. Democrats have found they can bash Republicans by falsely accusing them of destroying the environment. .. to acknowledge that air pollution has declined would require Republicans to say the words, “The regulations worked.” ..

Americans love challenges, and preventing artificial climate change is just the sort of technological and economic challenge at which this nation excels. It only remains for the right politician to recast the challenge in practical, optimistic tones... Cheap and fast improvement is not a pipe dream; it is the pattern of previous efforts against air pollution. The only reason runaway global warming seems unstoppable is that we have not yet tried to stop it."

I recognize that unlike previous air pollution, CO2 is the key product of combustion, rather than an irrelevant byproduct as most pollution is, so it will be harder to reduce. On the other hand, CO2 is directly related to fuel costs, which provide more economic push for reduction; America's efficiency is far behind comparable countries, and there is a large body of off-the-shelf efficiency technologies available; and are many non-fossil fuel alternatives already on the market, which drop in price with every year. Combining these factors, an 80% reduction in GHG from US levels seems to me feasible, especially over a 20-year period or longer. If I get the time, I'll write up the details behind these numbers in a future blog entry.

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:20:34 GMT

Tsunami and Peace Boost Illegal Indonesia Logging: "The rebels of Aceh are trading their guns for chain saws and cashing in on a logging binge that is jeopardizing the future of the world's third largest tropical forest reserves.

It's a cruel conjunction of good news and bad news: The rebellion is over, but peace has opened previously inaccessible virgin forests to illegal logging. Meanwhile, 130,000 homes destroyed by the tsunami of December 2004 need replacing, and demand for timber is almost insatiable. ..

Indonesia, whose tropical forest reserves are the world's largest after the Amazon and the Congo basin, has lost around 40 percent of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years. At this rate of deforestation -- an area the size of New Jersey lost each year -- lowland trees of Sumatra and the neighboring island of Borneo will disappear by 2010, according to Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund or WWF.

Aceh was largely protected during a decades-long separatist insurgency, with logging primarily limited to rebels and rogue elements within the military. But last year's peace deal opened up previously inaccessible virgin forests."

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:22:58 GMT

The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy: An NYU professor in the 7/26 NYT: Hezbollah has taken the lead on the most incendiary issue for jihadis of all stripes: the fight against Israel. Many Sunnis are therefore rallying to Hezbollah’s side, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan [and] the Saudi cleric Salman al-Awda .. For Al Qaeda, it is a time of panic. The group’s Web sites are abuzz with messages and questions about how to respond to Hezbollah’s success. One sympathizer asks whether, even knowing that the Shiites are traitors and the accomplices of the infidel Americans in Iraq, it is permissible to say a prayer for Hezbollah. He is told to curse Hezbollah along with Islam’s other enemies. ..

The truth is that Al Qaeda has met a formidable challenge in Hezbollah and its charismatic leader .. Al Qaeda’s improbable conspiracy theory does little to counter these advantages. .. Hezbollah will score a major propaganda victory in the Muslim world if it simply remains standing in Lebanon .. Perhaps Hezbollah’s ascendancy among Sunnis will make it possible for Shiites and Sunnis to stop the bloodletting in Iraq — and to focus instead on their “real” enemies, namely the United States and Israel. ..

[This would] mark a dangerous turn for the West. And there are darker implications still. Al Qaeda, after all, is unlikely to take a loss of status lying down. Indeed, the rise of Hezbollah makes it all the more likely that Al Qaeda will soon seek to reassert itself through increased attacks on Shiites in Iraq and on Westerners all over the world — whatever it needs to do in order to regain the title of true defender of Islam.

Two days later: Al-Zawahri Calls for Muslims to Rise Up: Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader called Thursday for Muslims to unite in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza until Islam reigns from ''Spain to Iraq.'' [in a] recruiting effort that even called on non-Muslims to join the Islamic cause. ..

Kamal Habib, a former member of Egypt's Islamic Jihad militant group who was jailed from 1981-1991 along with al-Zawahri, said the appeal to non-Muslims was unprecedented and reflected a change in tactics. ''This is a transformation in the vision of al-Qaida and its struggle with the United States. It is now trying to unite Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims and calling for non-Muslims to join the fight,'' he said. ..

''The war with Israel does not depend on cease-fires ... . It is a jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq,'' said al-Zawahri. ''We will attack everywhere. .. All the world is a battlefield open in front of us,'' ..

Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahhal refused to comment on the al-Zawahri tape." From other sources: "Another new audio or video message from bin Laden was also expected in the coming days and was planned to deal with Gaza and Lebanon, according to said IntelCentre, a US-based independent group that provides counter-terrorism information to the US government and media." How large a terrorist attack would be needed to return al-Qaida to prominence?

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:51:04 GMT

Million-dollar murray: Malcolm Gladwell in Feb 06 about how some social problems have power-law distributions -- a small number of hard cases cause almost all the social harm -- so that "solving the problem may be less expensive than managing it." Examples: police brutality traced to a very small number of repeat offenders; medical emergencies for the homeless caused by a relatively small number of chronically homeless; air pollution caused by the small proportion of vehicles that are out of compliance. These can be solved by targeted programs that are politically difficult, viewed as unfair or punative, so the problems persist, costing more than their solutions would.

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:19:05 GMT

The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq: From Pat Lang, former head of mideast intel at DIA. "American troops all over central and northern Iraq are supplied with fuel, food, and ammunition by truck convoy from a supply base hundreds of miles away in Kuwait. All but a small amount of our soldiers' supplies come into the country over roads that pass through the Shiite-dominated south of Iraq. Until now the Shiite Arabs of Iraq have been told by their leaders to leave American forces alone. But an escalation of tensions between Iran and the US could change that overnight. Moreover, the ever-increasing violence of the civil war in Iraq can change the alignment of forces there unexpectedly. Southern Iraq is thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian special operations forces working with Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades. Hostilities between Iran and the United States or a change in attitude toward US forces on the part of the Baghdad government could quickly turn the supply roads into a "shooting gallery" 400 to 800 miles long. ..

Compounding the looming menace of the Kuwait-based line of supply is the route followed by the cargo ships en route to Kuwait. Geography dictates that the ships all pass through the Strait of Hormuz and then proceed to the ports at the other end of the Gulf. Those who are familiar with the record of Iran's efforts against Kuwaiti shipping in the Iran-Iraq War will be concerned about this maritime vulnerability. ..

A reduction in supplies would inevitably affect operational capability. This might lead to a downward spiral of potential against the insurgents and the militias. This would be very dangerous for our forces. .. Potential adversaries along the line of supply include many combat-experienced and well-schooled officers and former officers. We can be sure that they are acutely aware of this weakness in our situation. ..

Are there alternatives to the present line of supply leading to Kuwait? .. A new line of supply leading from Turkey or Jordan would require [new port and warehouse] facilities. Turkey has not been very cooperative in this war, and a supply line leading from Jordan would have to pass through Anbar Province, the very heart of the Sunni Arab insurgencies. Creating new facilities [would be] politically difficult, and it would take time.

Few of the permanent requirements for uninterrupted resupply can be satisfied out of the local economy. .. It seems unlikely that air resupply could exceed 25 percent of daily requirements. This would not be enough to sustain the force...

The precarious nature of our supply line is well-known to our military leadership. Unfortunately, this is one of the many problems in Iraq that has not been adequately addressed because of a shortage of troops. We should start building ourselves another line of supply as a backup, and we should do it soon."

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:51:45 GMT

Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative: Surprising to me, and hopeful. " [A] television spot links images of drought, starvation and Hurricane Katrina to global warming. In it, the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., says: "As Christians, our faith in Jesus Christ compels us to love our neighbors and to be stewards of God's creation. The good news is that with God's help, we can stop global warming, for our kids, our world and for the Lord." The advertisements are to be shown in Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, is being supported by individuals and foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation."

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 18:25:28 GMT

'State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration': Review of the Risen book by Walter Isaacson, that makes some larger points: "Even those of us who like the idea of the intelligence agencies using data-mining and electronic surveillance to detect terrorist communications are uncomfortable with the possibility that future presidents, with murkier agendas, might secretly use such techniques, without any authorization, for any purpose they alone deem part of their war-making powers. In these cases, oversight is supposed to come from Congress, the special intelligence courts and the lawyers at the Justice Department, C.I.A. and White House. But in an administration that has little appreciation for Congressional authority or for meddling lawyers, and in a town where the president's party controls all branches of government, there were no such checks or balances.

Except the press. Whether on torture or wiretapping, the news media have become a de facto fourth branch that provides some small check on executive power. That is why so many concerned or disgruntled sources, especially from within the intelligence agencies, came forward to give Risen information. So what are we to believe in a book that relies heavily on leaks from disgruntled sources? We are in an age where the consumer of information has to make an educated guess about what percentage of assertions in books like this are true. My own guess is that Risen has earnest sources for everything he reports but that they don't all know the full story, thus resulting in a book that smells like it's 80 percent true. If that sounds deeply flawed, let me add that if he had relied on no anonymous sources and reported instead only the on-the-record line from official spinners, the result would very likely have been only half as true.

In fact, the new way we consume information provides a good argument for the role of an independent press that relies on leakers. Other journalists will and should build on, or debunk, the allegations reported by Risen. This will prompt many of the players to publish their own version of the facts. L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq after the invasion, has just come out with his book pointing fingers at the C.I.A. for giving him flawed intelligence and at Donald Rumsfeld for not giving him the troops he actually wanted. And Tenet, one hopes, will someday cash in on a hefty book contract by clamping cigar in mouth and pen in hand to give evidence that he was not the buffoonish toady Rumsfeld's aides portray him to be. Besides being fun to watch, this process is a boon for future historians.

So welcome to the new age of impressionistic history. Like an Impressionist painting, it relies on dots of varying hues and intensity. Some come from leakers like those who spoke to Risen. Other dots come from the memoirs and comments of the players. Eventually, a picture emerges, slowly getting clearer. It's up to us to connect the dots and find our own meanings in this landscape."

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 08:17:01 GMT

Rice Admits U.S. Underestimated Hamas Strength: After 9/11, Iraq WMD, the Iraq insurgency, and now Hamas, and for that matter, Katrina, yet again she says: "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing," she said .. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

Hamas's victory has set off a debate whether the administration was so wedded to its belief in democracy that it could not see the dangers of holding elections in regions where Islamist groups were strong and democratic institutions weak."

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:17:30 GMT

Lessons of post-Cold War development: Summarizes and links to papers by Harvard's Dani Rodrik, especially an excellent review of economic development policies since 1990, "Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?" For example: "While it is true that over the past ten years scores of developing nations have not experienced economic growth, and in some cases have actually fallen backwards, despite following the rules of the Washington Consensus, paradoxically, that doesn't mean the era of globalization has been an unmitigated disaster. Quite the contrary: "From the standpoint of global poverty," writes Rodrik, "the last two decades have proved the most favorable that the world has ever experienced. Rapid economic growth in China, India, and a few other Asian countries has resulted in an absolute reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty."

But what's fascinating is that China and India made their march forward, according to Rodrik, not by willy nilly opening up their markets with neoliberal abandon, but with great attention to policy choices, and with explicit government involvement in the economy that can only be described as industrial policy. The same was true of many of the East Asian nations who developed earlier, like Taiwan and South Korea, which only started to seriously open up after they had achieved substantial economic growth through a mix of protectionism, export subsidies, and other policy choices."

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:10:19 GMT

Dollars and Sense: Provocative article by David Brooks on voter alignments in the US, explaining why economic issues seem to matter less than cultural to most voters. "Over the past few decades, Democrats have generally conceived of America as a society divided between comfortable haves and insecure have-nots. Having read thousands of gloomy articles about downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation, they've tried to rally the insecure working majority against the privileged minority — or, as Al Gore put it, the people against the powerful...

Last year, the liberal economist Stephen Rose ..observed, "It is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population that is economically distressed." Rose concluded that only 19 % of males and 27 % of females are poor or working poor — a percentage that is "probably much smaller than most progressive commentators would estimate." .. [In recent decades] the share of bad jobs fell significantly as more workers with postsecondary education moved into an expanding set of managerial and professional jobs." "

Excluding the young (who vote less often) the point gets sharper. "Rose calculated the household incomes for people between 26 and 59 and found that the average annual family income is somewhere around $63,000 a year — an impressive figure. Opinion polls consistently show that people at these income levels feel as if they're doing quite well and don't feel oppressed by forces beyond their control. ..

over the past year the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner has noted that voters don't separate values issues from economic issues. They use values issues as stand-ins and figure the candidates they associate with traditional morality are also the ones with sensible economic policies. In the current issue of The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta [writes] "Traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle-class people they want to be like." ..

especially in the information age, social values and cultural capital shape a person's economic destiny more than the other way around. If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the core conservative truth is that culture matters most, and that the core liberal truth is that government can reshape culture. But liberals have turned culturally libertarian. Afraid to be judgmental about things like family structure, they've dropped out of the core values debate. Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein .. Middle-class Americans feel social anxiety more acutely than economic anxiety because they understand that values matter most."

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 06:59:40 GMT

My Outsourced Life: Funny article on individual outsourcing. I wonder how close to true it is?

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 04:36:36 GMT

Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History: "where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? ..

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so. ..

My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events? .. My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours. ..

It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency"

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:42:57 GMT

Sensors watch Barrier Reef coral: Cairns, Australia: "The Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) is working with James Cook University on a project called Digital Skins. Smart sensors, developed originally for use in nuclear power stations, are placed in the ocean and also in water catchments on the mainland. They are able to communicate with each other to monitor events such as coral bleaching as they happen. ..

Each sensor in the skin has its own numerical address and operating system. Using a global position system, the sensors know exactly where they are. Parameters such as salinity, temperature and nutrient levels are measured.

Communicating with the sensors is a challenge, particularly for those sensors located out on the reef. Using a technique that was discovered by the British during World War II, microwave signals are sent along the surface of the ocean. Initial tests have seen data sent as far as 70km (43.5 miles) in one hop.

The final link in the chain is grid computing. All these sensors create terabytes of data every day. High-speed links allow the various institutions to share their computing power. "

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 06:27:23 GMT

Poll finds broad approval of terrorist torture: "Most Americans and a majority of people in Britain, France and South Korea say torturing terrorism suspects is justified at least in rare instances, according to AP-Ipsos polling." The polling in Nov 2005, in the United States and eight of its closest allies, asked whether torture is ever justified:

In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions.
Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt that way.
In Canada, Mexico and Germany people are divided
Most people opposed torture under any circumstances in Spain and Italy. ..

In the poll, about two-thirds of the people living in Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Spain said they would oppose allowing U.S. officials to secretly interrogate terrorist suspects in their countries. Almost that many in Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they felt the same way. Almost two-thirds in the United States support such interrogations in the U.S. by their own government."

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:58:24 GMT

Truthiness 101: Nice definition. "Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don't understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts."

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:34:12 GMT

You're being watched ... Some facts on increased surveillance powers. "In 2004, the General Accounting Office surveyed 128 federal departments and agencies to determine the extent of data mining. It found 199 operations, [only] 14 of which related to counterterrorism. ..

A University of Illinois study found that in the 12 months following 9/11, federal agents made at least 545 visits to libraries to obtain information about patrons. ..

The Patriot Act allows law enforcement officers to get "sneak and peek" warrants to search a home for any suspected crime — and to wait months or even years to tell the owner they were there. Last July, the Justice Department told the House Judiciary Committee that only 12% of the 153 "sneak and peek" warrants it received were related to terrorism investigations. ..

The FBI has used Patriot Act powers to break into a judge's chambers and to procure records from medical clinics. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union recently revealed that the FBI used other new powers to eavesdrop on environmental, political and religious organizations."

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 17:20:28 GMT

War's stunning price tag: Linda Bilmes, former assistant secretary of Commerce, now teaching at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and Nobel Prize winner in 2001. recently estimated the likely cost of the war in Iraq. "We suggested that the final bill will be much higher than previously reckoned — between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending primarily on how much longer our troops stay. ..
the full costs of the war are still largely hidden below the surface. Our calculations include not just the money for combat operations but also the costs the government will have to pay for years to come. These include lifetime healthcare and disability benefits for returning veterans .. We also count the increased cost of replacing military hardware because the war is using up equipment at three to five times the peacetime rate. In addition, the military must pay large reenlistment bonuses and offer higher benefits to reenlist reluctant soldiers. On top of this, because we finance the war by borrowing more money (mostly from abroad), there is a rising interest cost on the extra debt..."

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:32:04 GMT

Did Castro Kill JFK? A German film finds intelligence and FBI officials who claim Cuba planned it and paid Oswald to do it. Getting coverage overseas, but curiously not in the US (via WashPost blog).

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:02:18 GMT

Dissecting the Chinese miracle: Concise summary of issues in China's current political economy, and why the near term future could get bumpy. Topics include:

China's loss-making state-owned enterprises, and how they employ masses of people while enriching local and regional officials that fight reform and suppress popular opposition
The need to rationalize development goals and credit allocation to build a modern economy, and how there will have to be many losers in this effort
The tension in the rich-poor, urban-rural and coastal-interior gaps
"China consumes 12 % of global energy, 25 % of aluminum, 28 % of steel and 42 % of cement -- but is responsible for only 4.3 % of total global economic output. Ultimately, while the "solution" espoused by Jiang's generation did forestall a civil breakdown, it also saddled China with thousands of new non-competitive projects, even more bad debt, and a culture of corruption so deep that cases of applied capital punishment for graft and embezzlement have soared into the thousands."
"Western investment into China has remained startlingly constant at about $7 billion annually. Only Asian investors whose systems are often plagued (like Japan's) by similar problems of profitability or (like Indonesia's) outright collapse have been increasing their exposure in China."
China "is now a World Trade Organization member, and nearly half of its GDP is locked up in international trade. Its WTO commitments dictate that by December, Beijing must allow any interested foreign companies to compete in the Chinese banking market without restriction. But without some fairly severe adjustments, this shift would swiftly suck the capital out of the Chinese banking system." So even the next two years could be turbulent.

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 22:41:55 GMT

The California Solar Initiative: "On January 12, the California Public Utilities Commission approved the California Solar Initiative by a 3-1 margin. With the previously approved 2006 budget, that a total of $3.2 billion in incentives over 11 years, enough for 3,000 megawatts of solar across the state. .. This is the biggest solar program in the country and, after Germany, the second largest in the world."

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:06:49 GMT

Why Do Some Turks Have Bird Flu Virus but Aren't Sick?: I wonder if surviving a mild version of bird flu immunizes against the bad version. "five cases in Ankara hospitals are different from those elsewhere in Asia. Four of the five display only mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.. Doctors are unsure whether they are for the first time seeing human bird flu in its earliest stages or if they are discovering that infection with the A(H5N1) virus does not always lead to illness. ..

Since none of the five have died, it is raising the possibility that human bird flu is not as deadly as currently thought, and that many mild cases in Asian countries may have gone unreported. Turkey is the first country outside eastern Asia to have human cases, and the first one anywhere to have so many separate animal outbreaks simultaneously.

In one week, Turkey announced 15 confirmed human cases of A(H5N1); Asia has seen only about 140 in the space of five years. .. In Ankara, where the government has been sending out vans with loudspeakers urging people to report symptoms and avoid contact with animals, even people with mild symptoms are being checked for bird flu, meaning that milder cases are more likely to be detected than they are in other parts of Asia. "I'm sure that part of the explanation for the high number of case in Turkey is better surveillance," said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the W.H.O. in Geneva." Again, better surveillance and quick communication are key.

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:19:01 GMT

Confidence Game: Analysis of Iran situation from Christopher Dickey. "Iraq has taught us that 'unknown unknowns' make lousy targets. Will Washington heed that lesson when it responds to Tehran breaking its nuclear seals?.. Even some of the most rabid Iranian opposition groups think the mullahs can withstand whatever the Israelis or Americans throw at them from the air—and in the aftermath the Iranian public would rally around the turbans. Indeed, some opposition groups think Ahmadinejad is intentionally goading the Israelis to launch a strike for just that reason. "If they attack him, he will have his war; if they do not, he will have his bomb," says one well-connected exile ..

"The Iranians think they are untouchable," says a European diplomat involved with the negotiations .. Yet patience with Tehran may be wearing thin in Moscow and Beijing. Both governments joined with France, Britain and the United States sending letters to the Iranians yesterday telling them to back off from a renewal of the uranium enrichment research. ..

Paradoxical as it may seem, their greatest weakness is their oil and gas industry. Sure, Iran has the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia. But its facilities for pumping and processing the stuff are in such a sorry state that domestic demand for gasoline is 60 percent greater than the country's refining capacity. To keep up, the mullahs have to import more than 95,000 barrels a day. Iran has the second-largest known reserves of natural gas in the world—but it's a net importer of the stuff its people use. To make matters much worse, the mullahs long ago adopted a policy trying to buy popular support with massively subsidized prices for cooking gas, gasoline and other products. Today, those subsidies eat up a whopping 10 percent of Iran's gross domestic product ..

If Ahmadinejad succeeds in provoking the United Nations to impose serious sanctions, cutting off Iran's imports of heavily subsidized natural gas and gasoline, the first people to suffer would be the Iranian president's core constituency—the poor and uneducated. A long, tense game lies ahead, but, again like Iraq in 2003, there are options short of war that may yet bring the desired results.."

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 16:33:36 GMT

Iran: Moscow missiles and Israel rumors: "Though the EU-3 has coordinated its diplomatic efforts with Washington, Iran is by no means isolated. Russia is clearly in Iran's corner. [It maintains] that Iran is in compliance with its NPT obligations and that Iran has the right to master the nuclear fuel cycle. In a very strong show of support for Tehran, Moscow agreed to sell Iran an air-defense system known as the Tor-M1. Arguably the most advanced system of its kind, the Tor-M1 uses a mobile launcher to track and destroy multiple targets, which can include incoming missiles, aircraft and helicopters. Moscow's deal with Tehran, which was signed early last month, calls for the delivery of 30 Tor-M1 systems in 2006 and is worth more than $1 billion. According to Russian sources, it is the largest weapons deal between Moscow and Tehran in the past five years. ..

Last month, stories surfaced in the international press indicating that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had already approved a strike against Iran to be mounted this March. Israel's recent acquisition of "bunker-busting" bombs from Washington indicates that an Israeli strike may well be under consideration."

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 06:38:38 GMT

Mob War In the Mideast: New info from "Syria's former vice president, Abdul Halim Khaddam. From exile in France, he gave an astonishing interview Friday that linked the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad to the murder last year of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. He told al-Arabiya television that "there were many threats" from Syria against Hariri before his death, and that it was "impossible that any apparatus in Syria could have taken a unilateral decision to murder Hariri" without Assad's approval.

[According to] Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Druze community and something of a warlord himself. .. As Assad is backed deeper into a corner, he cautioned, the situation will become more dangerous for Lebanon. "The more you squeeze the Syrians, the more they get aggressive here," Jumblatt said. .. Like other Lebanese I spoke with this week, he fears a deadly new attack by the Syrians that would attempt to trigger sectarian conflict in Lebanon -- and take the heat off Damascus. Jumblatt argues that the only stable outcome will be regime change in Syria -- a "Milosevic solution" that will bring Assad to justice through the United Nations. ..

What makes the Syria-Lebanon situation especially volatile, Jumblatt explained, is that it is linked to the radical new Iranian regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He argued that Iran is using its alliance with Assad and Hezbollah in its larger strategic battles against Israel and the United States. "It's as if we are defending Iranian nuclear facilities from the border of Lebanon," he said."

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 18:44:17 GMT

Democracy and terrorism: Feb 2005 NYT article by Richard A. Clarke. "Following the president's theory, they might assume terrorism cannot grow in democracies and that the best way to deal with it is to create more democracies. Unfortunately, both beliefs may be mistaken. ..

in the greater Muslim world, opposing democracy is not uppermost in the mind of Al Qaeda or the larger jihadist network. (In Saudi Arabia, for example, Al Qaeda wants the monarchy replaced by a more democratic government.) Radical Islamists are ultimately seeking to create something orthogonal to our model of democracy. They are fighting to create a theocracy or, in their vernacular, a caliphate (a divinely inspired government administered by a caliph as Allah's viceroy on earth). They are also seeking to evict American influence from nations with a Muslim majority .. In pursuing these goals, today's loosely affiliated Islamic terrorist groups are part of a trend dating back to at least 1928, when the Muslim Brotherhood was founded to promote Islam and fight colonialism.

This trend hasn't abated with the spread of democracy. In Indonesia, .. the jihadist movement is growing stronger, as it is in other Asian democracies. In Algeria, free elections in 1990 and 1991 resulted in victories for those who advocated a jihadist theocracy. Throughout Western Europe, the jihadists are becoming deeply rooted among disaffected Muslim youth. Free elections, in short, have not dimmed the desire of jihadists to create a caliphate.

Even without jihadists, Western democracies have hardly been immune to terrorism. The Irish Republican Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang of Germany and the Red Brigades of Italy all developed in democracies. Indeed, in the United States, the largest terrorist attack before Sept. 11 was conducted in Oklahoma by fully enfranchised American citizens.

Thus, it is not the lack of democracy that produced jihadist movements, nor will the creation of democracies quell them. .. President Bush's democracy-promotion policy will be appropriate and laudable at the right time in the right nations, but it is not the cure for terrorism and may divert us from efforts needed to rout Al Qaeda and reduce our vulnerabilities at home. The president is right that resentment is growing and that it is breeding terrorism, but it is chiefly resentment of us, not of the absence of democracy. The 9/11 Commission had a proposal similar to the president's, but more on point: a battle of ideas to persuade more Muslims that jihadist terrorism is a perversion of Islam. Most Middle East experts agree, however, that any American hand in the battle of ideas will, for now, be counterproductive. For many in the Islamic world, the United States is still associated with such acts as having made the 250,000 person city of Falluja uninhabitable. Because of the enormous resentment of the United States government in the Islamic world, documented in numerous opinion polls, we will have to look to nongovernmental organizations and other nations to lead the battle of ideas. "

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 18:36:03 GMT

Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered: I missed this story from August 2005. I found no updates since then. So we are more exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq today than in 2002. "U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday. Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad. ..

Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration cited evidence that Saddam Hussein's government was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for the invasion. No such weapons or factories were found. .. Investigators still were trying to determine who had assembled the alleged lab and whether the expertise came from foreign insurgents or former members of Hussein's security apparatus, the military said. .. A [smaller] lab discovered last year in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah contained a how-to book on chemical weapons and an unspecified amount of chemicals .. No chemical weapons are known to have been used so far in Iraq's insurgency."

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:50:27 GMT

Gapminder: An interactive presentation for the "Human Development Report 2005" by UNDP, relating population, income and health across countries and regions over 50 years. Much improved in recent months. In 10 minutes, it conveys a lot about where the world is going.

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:12:25 GMT

State Department takes over Iraq reconstruction: 2.5 years late. "President George W. Bush on Wednesday announced that the State Department would lead all US post-conflict reconstruction, a move that supersedes the controversial decision to give that task to the Pentagon in Iraq following the 2003 invasion."

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 18:54:56 GMT

Op-Eds for Sale: "For years, rumors have swirled of an underground opinion "pay-for-play" industry in Washington in which think-tank employees and pundits trade their ability to shape public perception for cash. ..

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow [also] writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service .. Copley News Service announced it is suspending Bandow pending its own review. ..

Bandow isn't the only think-tanker to have received payments from Abramoff for writing articles. Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. "I do that all the time," Ferrara says. "I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."

Ferrara, who has been an influential conservative voice on Social Security reform, among other issues, says he doesn't see a conflict of interest in taking undisclosed money to write op-ed pieces because his columns never violated his ideological principles. "It's a matter of general support," Ferrara says. "These are my views, and if you want to support them, then that's good." But he adds that at some point over the years, Abramoff stopped working with him: "Jack lost interest in me and felt he had other writers who were writing in more prominent publications," Ferrara says.

Ferrara's boss has a very different take on the Abramoff op-ed writing than did his peers at Cato. "If somebody pinned me down and said, 'Do you think this is wrong or unethical?' I'd say no," says Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Giovanetti says critics are applying a "naive purity standard" to the op-ed business. "I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements."

Ferrara began working at the Institute for Policy Innovation after the period during which he wrote the op-ed pieces for Abramoff. Earlier, he worked at the activist anti-tax organization Americans for Tax Reform. .. He also wrote a 1998 book called The Choctaw Revolution: Lessons for Federal Indian Policy. Ferrara says the tribe paid him directly for his work on the book, which was published by the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation"

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 17:32:44 GMT

What the Troops Really Need: US nation-building assets are weak. "If you think that the $500 billion military is stretched thin, take a look at the anemic, $10 billion State Department. Most military officers crying for assistance in the field do not realize how small their diplomatic sister agency is. There are more musicians playing for the military services' bands than there are Foreign Service officers at State. This severe lack of capacity leaves the military with the bulk of the building, in addition to the clearing and the holding."

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:12:28 GMT

Software That Binds, And Converts, And Retains: In two articles, Baseline magazine profiles the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software in churches. They track people so that visitors become members, members contribute and volunteer more, and members change churches ("churn") less -- all classic CRM. "Eighteen months ago, [pastor] Hand implemented a new process based on software from a company called ConnectionPower to improve the church's outreach methods. ConnectionPower features modules for such things as automating the visitor follow-up process, tracking donations and revenues, and creating a Web portal for members. It's priced from $1,000 for a small church to about $20,000 for churches with 6,000 or more members.

At [Hand's church], new visitors continue to fill out registration cards as they had in the past, with information such as family member names, ages, address [and] e-mail address. But now volunteers immediately type the information into the Windows-based ConnectionPower software. And now, each Monday morning, Hand or his assistant logs in to the system and see the names of the new visitors. .. The software then produces follow-up recommendations. For example, if a 28-year-old mother of two visits, the software prompts a volunteer of a similar age and background to make contact later in the week."

And the churches embrace podcasting and other media. "69%of evangelicals use the Internet to send, receive and forward spiritual e-mail and electronic greeting cards and request prayers online, according to a Pew Internet survey last year. That's compared with 51% of Catholics and 54% of Jews, the Pew Internet study said. .. Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, an evangelical church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with 18,000 members, lets Apple iPod users download and take along a daily message from pastor Bob Coy, as part of what the church calls its Active Word Ministry. .. "If you don't have a parking lot, you can't get the people in the church to hear the message and ultimately lead them to the Lord. A Web site is as important as a parking lot to a church." "

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:13:17 GMT

Brain imaging detects lies: "Brain-imaging techniques that reveal when a person is lying are now reliable enough to identify criminals, claim researchers. .. neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia have now told Nature that they believe their test is ready for real-life scenarios. Daniel Langleben and his colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track people's brains when they lie and tell the truth. By analysing brain activity during both scenarios, they have developed an algorithm that can detect lies from truth with 99% accuracy.

Team member Ruben Gur points out that, unlike the polygraph, fMRI does not rely on controllable symptoms such as sweating or a fast heartbeat. Instead it monitors the central nervous system. When someone lies, their brain inhibits them from telling the truth, and this makes the frontal lobes more active. "A lie is always more complicated than the truth," says Gur. "You think a bit more and fMRI picks that up." ..

Langleben has previously warned that fMRI is a research tool, not a way to spot liars. But the latest research has changed his tune. "We can't say whether this person will one day use a bomb," he says. "But we can use fMRI to find concealed information. We can ask: is X involved in terrorist organization Y?" .. Critics argue that lab experiments do not equate to real-life situations. .. Critics and researchers agree that more funding is needed to standardize the method and iron out ethical concerns before the approach is used routinely. The team's next step is to expand its studies to include women, people of different cultures, and psychopaths."

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:00:15 GMT

Opinion Leaders Turn Cautious, Public Looks Homeward: Pew poll reveals long term trends. Most striking: " Fully 42% of Americans say the United States should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." This is on par with the percentage expressing that view during the mid-1970s, following the Vietnam War, and in the 1990s after the Cold War ended. " Note the least isolation occured after the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 9/11. Many other interesting findings, e.g. "Pluralities in every group of influentials – as well as the public – attribute the fact that there has not been a terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 to luck. Just a third of the public – and no more than a third in any elite group – says it is because the government has done a good job in protecting the country."

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:52:19 GMT

Shattering Iraq: Review of civil war histories related to Iraq. "By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality."

A Council on Foreign Relations report adds evidence that the Iraqi national army is not really national: "There is a growing chorus of complaints from Sunni Arab leaders that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) has been infiltrated by Shiite militias that engage in torture, kidnappings, and, in some cases, deaths squads against Sunnis. .. “The ISF is not a true national force but rather a carved-up conglomeration of militias,” says Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst with the Congressional Research Service."

Also from Peter Galbraith, who welcomes the consitution's minimal central state in What Are We Holding Together?: "There is no reason to mourn the passing of the unified Iraqi state. For Iraq's 80-year history, Sunni Arab dictators held the country together -- and kept themselves in power -- with brutal force that culminated in Hussein's genocide against the Kurds and mass killings of Shiites. As a moral matter, Iraq's Kurds are no less entitled to independence than are Lithuanians, Croatians or Palestinians. And if Iraq's Shiites want to run their own affairs, or even have their own state, on what democratic principle should they be denied? If the price of a unified Iraq is another dictatorship, it is too high a price to pay."

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:38:07 GMT

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion: "The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials. The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition. The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members ..

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced. ..

Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation"

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:02:11 GMT

The Hubris of the Humanities: "Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists.

This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change. In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S"

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:24:50 GMT

It's Not Whether You 'Win' or 'Lose': "[Is] all of this vocabulary -- winning, losing, victory, defeat -- is simply misplaced? There are, after all, wars that are not actually won or lost... There are wars that end ambivalently -- wars, for example, such as the one we fought in Korea...

Iraq is not Korea, of course, and the Middle East is not Asia. But it is perfectly possible that the two conflicts might eventually resemble one another in the ambivalence of their conclusions. Although both the administration and its antiwar opponents speak as if there must be an either/or solution for Iraq -- either democracy or Islamic fascism -- it is perfectly possible that we end up with both. We may indeed create the first truly democratic Arab regime, with independent media, real elections and a relatively liberal political culture. But we may also, simultaneously, strengthen al Qaeda and its radical Islamic allies, in Iraq and the entire region. We may create a more entrepreneurial, globally integrated Iraq that can inspire economic reform throughout the Middle East. We may also create a deep well of international anti-American resentment that hampers our ability to conduct everything from trade negotiations to counterintelligence for decades to come.

It is even possible, in the end, that we really will help bring into existence a new generation of democratic Arab reformers across the Middle East -- and that we will need to keep troops in the region for five decades to defend them. Would such an outcome mean the war was a "defeat"? Not necessarily. Would it mean the war was a "victory"? Not exactly. Can we, the nation that invented the Hollywood happy ending, live with such a conclusion? Hard to imagine, but we might not have a choice. "

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:18:35 GMT

Al-Qaida Deputy Urges Oil-Plant Attacks: "Al-Qaida's deputy leader called for attacks against Gulf oil facilities and urged insurgent groups in Iraq to unite to drive out American forces.. The posting was a full version of a video by al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri that was issued on Sept. 19, excerpts of which were broadcast by the Arab television network Al-Jazeera at the time. .. "I call on the holy warriors to concentrate their campaigns on the stolen oil of the Muslims, most of the revenues of which go to the enemies of Islam," al-Zawahri, the Egyptian deputy of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, said in a portion of the tape not previously broadcast."

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:42:07 GMT

How wikis are evolving: Several recent examples of how large numbers of collaborators can contribute and distribute information rapidly:

Wikinews collected stories from "citizen journalists" during Katrinareporting, linking and photographing from Louisiana and around the world. Among professional journaists, the Online Journalism Review also assembled a wiki to aggregate crucial information after Katrina struck.
The Katrina Information Map, a public resource for tracking or reporting flood damage. "most people are using the service to inquire about loved ones or report flooding on various streets."
London bombings information was tracked in real time. Among other things, you can view every revision as it was posted to see how the information was released.
The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2003 looking for evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It put the 4000 pages of documents on the a Detention Practices Project wiki and asked readers of the community blog Daily Kos to rapidly read and review them.
Authors Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig post their latest books online and invite readers to note errata or updates for the next edition. "Assembling pages of errata for my editor was a pain in the ass and very hard to use comprehensibly, especially when I got thoughts from readers in no particular order," Doctorow said. "Wikis let my readers self-organize it."

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 07:44:13 GMT

The Man Who Sold the War: How the Rendon Group started in political PR and later worked for the CIA and the Pentagon. Since 1991, it promoted Chalabi and the INC, spread false information, and perform "military deception" through news media and the Internet. Judith Miller was one conduit. "Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions." "

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 04:10:46 GMT

The Burden of Proof: Pat Lang takes on Cheney's latest speech, and makes a point on recent history that's news to me. "The UN had withdrawn its inspectors from [Iraq] in '98 at our instigation because we were going to bomb extensively in an attempt to trigger a revolt. Fair enough, but the point is that the IRAQIS did not run the inspectors out of the country."

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 06:48:47 GMT

What I Knew Before the Invasion: Former Senator Bob Graham. "As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress. I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. ..

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems...

We [Senators] insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts .. Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary. ..

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth. On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq."

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 06:29:34 GMT

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball' - Los Angeles Times: Long, astounding summary of deceit, incompetence, and wishful thinking. "Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said...

An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed. ..

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war. "We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence." .. CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. .. Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa. ..

Curveball's reports were highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi spies with access to weapons programs at the time. .. More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases.

Powell said he was never warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA headquarters before his U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased," Powell said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it." ..

But BND officials said their U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's story had been corroborated. "They kept on telling us there were three or four sources," said the senior German intelligence official. "They said it many times."

On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied. On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.

The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later. ..

In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange. Kay said he was assigned to a windowless office without a working telephone.

On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the Union Speech for finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would continue to this day." Kay quit three days later and went public with his concerns. ..

The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." "

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 08:19:13 GMT

Exaggerating The Threats: It's not the first time that Wolfowitz and other neocons cried wolf. Fareed Zacharia in 2003: "For decades some conservatives, including many who now wield great influence, have had a tendency to vastly exaggerate the threat posed by tyrannical regimes. It all started with the now famous "Team B" exercise. During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B--which included Paul Wolfowitz--produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.

In retrospect, Team B's conclusions were wildly off the mark. .. The reality was that even the CIA’s own estimates--savaged as too low by Team B--were, in retrospect, gross exaggerations. .. In the 1990s, some of these same conservatives decided that China was the new enemy. .. What followed was wild speculation about the size of the Chinese military and accusations that it had engaged in massive theft of American nuclear secrets. This came to a crescendo with the publication of the Cox Commission Report in 1999, which claimed that Chinese military spending was twice what the CIA estimated. The Cox report is replete with speculation, loose assumptions and errors of fact. The book it footnotes for its military-spending numbers, for example, does not say what the report claims.

Iraq is part of a pattern. In each of these cases, arguments about the threat posed by a country rest in large part on the character of the regime. .. these regimes are nasty, and that does matter greatly. But threat assessment must be based not simply on the intentions of an adversary, but on his capabilities as well. This is an important lesson as we move forward to deal with repressive regimes like those in North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. They are evil and may need to be confronted. But let us do so with a clear and accurate picture of the threat they pose, not some figment of our fevered imaginations.

What we discovered about the Soviet Union after the cold war was that it was every bit as evil as we had thought--indeed more so--but that it was a whole lot less powerful than we had feared. That is what we will probably discover about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. "

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 08:13:34 GMT

Doing unto others as they did unto us: From M. Gregg Bloche, law professor at Georgetown and a visiting fellow at Brookings, and Jonathan Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins. More details in the article.

"How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? .. Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train U.S. soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody... At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the U.S. Southern Command, General James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture.. internal FBI e-mail messages critical of these methods .. refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." .. SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions U.S. prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees..

the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because they were designed by Communist interrogators to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers."

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 06:18:48 GMT

Why the Democrats Are Happy Warriors: 5 ideas for 2006, from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

Expand support for higher education. "Make college as universal in the 21st century as high school was in the 20th"; three out of four jobs in the new, high-tech economy require two years or more of higher education.
Create a National Institute of Science and Engineering, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Funding for the nih has quadrupled since the 1980s, from $7 billion to $28 billion. "That's why we lead in pharmaceuticals and medical technology." Funding for science has been stagnant—about $5 billion—during that period. "I'd quadruple it and concentrate on nanotechnology, broadband and energy."
Promote energy independence. Reduce foreign oil by 50% in 10 years. Create a hybrid economy. Use government contracts and tax incentives to boost solar and wind power.
"You got a job, you got health care." Give the uninsured vouchers for use in the insurance system that covers federal employees.
Organize a bipartisan summit on the budget. Balance it. Everything on the table—loopholes, pork, Bush tax cuts. [And this requires:] "Clean up the relationship between lobbyists and legislators -- .. the gifts, free trips, the revolving-door lobbying jobs for staff members."

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:07:38 GMT

A 'fiscal hurricane' on the horizon: Outlines issues, profiles several budget crusaders. "Without major spending cuts, tax increases or both, the national debt will grow more than $3 trillion through 2010, to $11.2 trillion — nearly $38,000 for every man, woman and child. The interest alone would cost $561 billion in 2010, the same as the Pentagon. ..

cutting the deficit [has] backfired at the polls. The elder Bush lost re-election, the Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans' obstinacy helped Clinton win a second term. "The choices you have to make are almost exactly the opposite of what wins political elections," Panetta says."

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 20:04:26 GMT

Our Faith in Science: The Dalai Lama on of science and spirituality. "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview. ..

By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry. Rather, I am speaking of what I call "secular ethics," which embrace the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths. ..

A deeper dialogue between neuroscience and society - indeed between all scientific fields and society - could help deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and our responsibilities for the natural world we share with other sentient beings. Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity"

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 07:40:39 GMT

Pssst ... Nobody Loves a Torturer: "Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, "Abu Ghraib." A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to "the little people." ..

today, what angers friends of America abroad is not that abuses like those at Abu Ghraib happened. Some lapses are probably an inevitable consequence of war, terrorism and insurgencies. What angers them is that no one beyond a few "little people" have been punished, the system has not been overhauled, and even now, after all that has happened, the White House is spending time, effort and precious political capital in a strange, stubborn and surely futile quest to preserve the option to torture."

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 07:37:45 GMT

A Threat Worse Than Terror: "A flu pandemic is the most dangerous threat the United States faces today," says Richard Falkenrath, who until recently served in the Bush administration as deputy Homeland Security adviser. .. One makes a threat assessment on the basis of two factors: the probability of the event, and the loss of life if it happened. On both counts, a pandemic ranks higher than a major terror attack, even one involving weapons of mass destruction. ..

The total funding request for influenza-related research this year is about $119 million. To put this in perspective, we are spending well over $10 billion to research and develop ballistic-missile defenses, which protect us against an unlikely threat (even if they worked). We are spending $4.5 billion a year on R&D—drawings!—for the Pentagon's new joint strike fighter. Do we have our priorities right? ..

The World Health Organization should become the global body that analyzes samples, monitors viruses, evaluates cures and keeps track of the best practices. Yet the WHO leads a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on the whims and grants of governments. A year ago its flu branch had five people. Now it has 12. It needs a much, much larger staff and its own set of laboratories around the world that would allow it to fulfill this clearinghouse function"

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 07:19:26 GMT

History's Worst Software Bugs: Cool story of software bugs with bad effects. First, why "bug"? In 1945, "engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

My favorite story was an intentional bug placed by the CIA in 1982. The background refs are worth reading. "Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history."

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:45:38 GMT

Torture and terror: From the comments to Pat Lang's earlier piece. "Torture works! Not as source of information, but as instrument of terror. That's the dirty secret. It's to scare the general populus and to feed the visceral feeling to hurt people we don't like. That is why eradicating torture is so hard. It's an effective instrument of supression. .."

"The Chinese have a colorful proverb for your "torture one to terrorize another" example: "Kill the chicken, scare the monkey." " ..

"There's an iraqi folk tale that almost exactly fits your chinese aphorism. .. A man bought a monkey to weave at his loom. When he got the monkey home he started showing it how the loom worked. But the monkey jumped up into the rafters and laughed at him. So the man brought in a sheep and started teaching the sheep how to weave. The monkey laughed at that too. Sheep have hooves, they can't weave. The man demonstrated it all three times to the sheep but the sheep just went Baa, baa. Then the man got angry. "If you won't weave, why should you live?" and he cut the sheep's throat and cut the head entirely off. And then the monkey stopped laughing and got scared, he jumped down from the rafters and started weaving as fast as he could. And that is where we get the proverb, "Kill the sheep so the monkey will learn.""

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:23:11 GMT

Canada, carmakers sign tough emissions pact: Explicit cooperation between blue states and other countries on enviro issues. "Faced with the threat that Canada would adopt tough, California-style rules on auto emissions, major automakers agreed Tuesday [April 2005] to voluntarily reduce the global-warming emissions of cars and light trucks sold north of the border. Auto industry watchdogs said the deal, signed Tuesday in Windsor, Ontario, by officials of the Canadian government and the nation's automobile industry, could force automakers to adopt similar stringent emissions rules for vehicles sold throughout the United States.

The agreement follows the lead of regulations adopted last November in California, which U.S. automakers -- the same multinational giants that dominate Canada's auto industry -- are seeking to overturn in court. Tuesday's pact commits the manufacturers to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions of their vehicles sold in Canada by 5.3 million metric tons -- about 25 percent -- by the end of 2010. In comparison, rules adopted in California oblige automakers to reduce their global-warming emissions by 30 percent, starting in 2009 and culminating in 2016.

Supporters of California's rules praised Tuesday's deal but said it showed the automakers were being two-faced, voluntarily adopting standards in Canada that they oppose south of the border. .. "But it shows that the steps on global warming that car manufacturers say would wreak havoc in California are eminently doable," said [Tom Dresslar, spokesman for the Calif. attorney general]. "If you look at the history of this industry, whenever there are regulations proposed about safety, consumers and the environment, Detroit comes out with the Chicken Little routine, and that has never turned out to be an accurate prediction of the future." ..

the new standards will force an unprecedented increase in gas mileage for more than one-third of the vehicles sold in North America. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine have adopted California's strict emissions targets. With this mass of auto buyers now joined by millions of Canadians, the auto industry is under increasing pressure to adopt the new levels for all its fleets, rather than offering different models for the two different markets.

Canada's voluntary deal may have been set in motion by unprecedented cooperation between California officials and their Canadian counterparts, who have met in recent months to discuss the possibility of Canada's adopting California's air quality rules. .. "California's pressure and the cross-border visits were very instrumental in helping the Canadian government to move forward and get the deal," said John Bennett, senior policy adviser for energy for the Sierra Club of Canada. "

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 06:21:23 GMT

Cheney and the "Tormenters": Pat Lang, retired Green Beret and colonel in military intelligence, weighs in on torture. "People often ask me at public events if I think it is "all right" to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the "Global War on Terror." (GWOT) I routinely tell them that it is NOT "all right" to torture people for any reason. The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing. Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless. Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade. Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.

The audience is usually a little more surprised to have me tell them that "torture" is a dishonorable and immoral thing to do and that a decent person, especially a decent soldier, will have nothing to do with such things and will not allow it to happen around him or her. .. [Imagine some] creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk. "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....." That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?" ..

"OK," says I. "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,' so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you "in" for that?" Shocked silence follows. "Ah, I get it," says I. " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things." At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.

"Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?" This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).

The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive. They hold out to the "dark ones" the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination. There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners "for interrogation" the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us. "

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:41:09 GMT

Saying Goodbye California Sun, Hello Midwest: Californians cashing out and moving east. Good graphic showing net migration out of San Fran.

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 18:04:22 GMT

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny: Chilling details on the growth of secret surveillance and data mining. "The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined."

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 07:21:06 GMT

Blue Movie - The "morality gap" is becoming the key variable in American politics: "It is an axiom of American politics that people vote their pocketbooks, and for seventy years the key political divisions in the United States were indeed economic. .. But over the past several elections a new political configuration has begun to emerge.. What is the force behind this transformation? In a word, sex. ..

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. ..

The demographic reality is that as currently constituted, liberal Blue America is growing and conservative Red America is in decline. Take church attendance. .. From 1972 to 2000 the proportion of voters who said they attended services every week dropped from 38 to 25 percent. .. The one group that has grown dramatically consists of those who never go to church or synagogue. This group, which has become a mainstay of liberal politics, made up just 11 percent of the population in 1972 but 33 percent in 2000.

Thus if the Republican Party hopes to build on its 2002 gains, it must continue to mute its social conservatism when speaking to the public. .. As long as al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea dominate the news, the Republicans will be able to maintain their slight advantage. But should war fade into the background, or as soon as emboldened congressional Republicans begin moving to restrict Americans' sexual autonomy, the currently weakened Democratic Party will be positioned to push back"

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 07:14:13 GMT

CBS Poll Finds Public Takes Plamegate Seriously: "Some 51% said it is already of "great importance," with 35% choosing "some importance" and 12% "little or not importance." " For comparison:

Plamegate (11/05): Great importance - 51%, Some - 35%, Little/none - 12%
Clinton-Lewinsky (1/98) : Great importance - 41%, Some - 21%, Little/none - 37%
Whitewater (3/94): Great importance - 20%, Some - 29%, Little/none - 45%
Iran-Contra (2/87) : Great importance - 48%, Some - 33%, Little/none - 19%
Watergate (5/73) : Great importance - 53%, Some - 25%, Little/none - 22%

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 07:05:50 GMT

For Americans, Getting Sick Has Its Price: Not exactly "best in the world". "The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. More than half went without needed care because of cost and more than one-third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated.

Although patients in every nation sometimes run into obstacles to getting care and deficiencies when they do get treated, the United States stood out for having the highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs, the survey found."

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 06:49:11 GMT

Fabricated Links? Even the Saddam-Zarqawi link has fallen apart, with more faked documents. "An updated CIA re-examination of the issue recently concluded that Saddam's regime may not have given Zarqawi "safe haven" after all. .. [Zarqawi] used an alias and was there under what one U.S. intelligence official calls a "false cover." No evidence has been found showing senior Iraqi officials were even aware of his presence, according to two counterterrorism analysts familiar with the classified CIA study.. An intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that the current draft says that "most evidence suggests Saddam Hussein did not provide Zarqawi safe haven before the war. It also recognizes that there are still unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge about the relationship." ..

the Pentagon and Cheney's office have been reluctant to abandon the case: in the months after U.S. and allied forces deposed Saddam, NEWSWEEK has learned, Iraqi informants approached U.S. intelligence personnel with what purported to be caches of documents proving that Saddam's dealings with Al Qaeda were extensive. .. However, the CIA ultimately established that most key documents about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection turned over were faked—just like the documents purporting to show Iraqi purchases of uranium."

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 07:45:08 GMT

China's Little Green Book: "Green China will be much more challenging than Red China.. The China Daily reported that China's 11th five-year plan, which starts soon, includes a program to sharply reduce China's energy usage per unit of G.D.P. by 2010. "To hit the target, a huge business potential will be open to investors," [said] Zhou Dadi, director of China's top energy research institute.. "China is growing three times as fast as we are," Mr. Watson said, "[so] a lot of innovation is going to happen here, and once it is introduced [on the low-cost China platform] it is going to spread a lot faster. ... The Japanese and Europeans are here in a big way, and they are giving their stuff away. ... We deserve to lose. We are clutching our past with these tremulous hands, and everyone else is vigorously grasping the future."

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 07:42:35 GMT

Map of the 'cabal': Who was who in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hi-res available.

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:57:25 GMT

Ending the Fraudulence: Krugman hits it again. "this administration's political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.

Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth.. Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration's monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war. .. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic. .. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled... even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week. ..

Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots. .. journalists [should] ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public? "

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:18:05 GMT

U.K. Poll: Iraqis Oppose Foreign Troops: "Four out of five Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. and British troops in their country, and two out of five believe insurgent attacks on those troops are justified, according to a "secret" poll conducted by the British Ministry of Defense. The findings were reported in the Sunday Telegraph, a conservative newspaper that strongly supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003." More details on opposition to coalition forces, and the implications for the "hearts and minds" campaign.

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:00:38 GMT

"Artists and Bureaucrats" A paper from Pat Lang, diagnosing the problems with US intelligence, principally the tendency for management to be risk averse and antagonistic towards the intelligence professionals, and the pressure from political leaders to support their predefined policies. He also offers ideas from other countries. "This problem exists across the world in every country where serious foreign policy and military issues must be considered and decisions on policy and strategy made on the basis of a systematic consideration of available data. .. In some places external “think tanks” are used to “test” the result of internal analysis. In others countries, reliance is placed on the competitive analysis of two or more intelligence agencies, often one military and the other civilian. In Israel, within the Directorate of Military Intelligence there exists something called the “Devil’s Advocate” [whose members] have the job of opposing the analysis accepted by the government and of preventing the acceptance of institutional “group think” as the basis for decisions. For the senior Israeli officers who serve in the “Devil’s Advocate” section it is understood that opposition to the judgments of the rest of the intelligence community will have a career price and that the officers who do this work should look forward to a fruitful life in retirement from the army soon after their service in this job. Nevertheless, they perform a vital; perhaps “priceless” is not too strong a word, service for their country. None of these devices seem altogether suitable for the United States as a “safeguard” against overwhelming pressure to bring their analysis into conformity with policy. The sheer scale of the institutions involved in American life dictate modification of the methods used in smaller governments. Some approach that combines the better features of these institutional “fixes” would probably be appropriate."

This reminds me of the moves toward growing a system of open source intelligence as a counter-balance to conventional secret intelligence.

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:54:42 GMT

Next steps in Iraq: A few notes I wrote this morning. Update: John Kerry released a speech he'll give tonight with the same points.

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:25:53 GMT

Zbigniew Brzezinski: A sorry foreign policy own goal: "About 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental Study of History, that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was "suicidal statecraft". Sadly for President George W. Bush's place in history and, much more important, ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the US since the cataclysm of September 11. ..

[The Iraq] war, advocated by a narrow circle of decision-makers for motives still not fully exposed, propagated publicly by rhetoric reliant on false assertions, has turned out to be much more costly in blood and money than anticipated. .. In the Middle East it has stamped the US as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs. Fair or not, that perception has become widespread throughout the world of Islam. .. It is a self-delusion for Americans to be told that the terrorists are motivated mainly by an abstract "hatred of freedom" and that their acts are a reflection of a profound cultural hostility. If that were so, Stockholm or Rio de Janeiro would be as much at risk as New York City. Yet, in addition to New Yorkers, the principal victims of serious terrorist attacks have been Australians in Bali, Spaniards in Madrid, Israelis in Tel Aviv, Egyptians in the Sinai and Britons in London. There is an obvious political thread connecting these events: the targets are America's allies and client states in its deepening military intervention in the Middle East. ..

America's ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation has also suffered. The contrast between the attack on the militarily weak Iraq and America's forbearance of a nuclear-armed North Korea has strengthened the conviction of the Iranians that their security can only be enhanced by nuclear weapons...

In a very real sense, during the past four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle. Because the US is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, for a while longer, a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. .. Flailing away with a stick at a hornets' nest while loudly proclaiming "I will stay the course" is an exercise in catastrophic leadership. ..

But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible.. In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out, perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the US leaves, the sooner the Shias, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail. "

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 07:27:43 GMT

The forged Niger-Iraq documents: The latest on the Italian sources of the faked documents. "Yet if anyone knew who was actually responsible for the White House's trumpeting of the Niger claims, it would seem from the Repubblica report that Hadley did. He also knew that the CIA, which had initially rejected the Italian claims, was not to blame. Hadley's meeting with Pollari, at precisely the time when the Niger forgeries came into the possession of the U.S. government, may explain the seemingly hysterical White House overreaction to Wilson's article almost a year later."

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 06:58:29 GMT

Going It Alone: While Miller and the NYT take deserved heat for parroting Bush administration sources in the run-up to Iraq, it's worth remembering how and why the Knight Ridder team, especially Washington reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, got it right. "I think the failure of the media in general in covering this story," Landay says, "is as egregious as the intelligence failure."

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 01:58:24 GMT

Revisions name Syrian names: Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California, Irvine. "The just released Mehlis Report investigating who was behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri contains two surprises.. A colleague emailed me the report explained, "Go to the top of p. 29, parag. 96. .. turn on… track changes …"

So I clicked on track changes and, voila, right at the second sentence of parag. 96, where the text reads "senior Lebanese and Syrian officials decided to assassinate Rafik Hariri…" an edit box popped up in the right margin that revealed that the phrase "Senior Lebanese officials" had in fact replaced the actual names of these officials, which were deleted before publication of the final draft. Fortunately for the world, however, they were deleted using Microsoft Word's "track changes" tool, because of which they remained visible to anyone who happened to have it turned on when he or she opened the file.

Who are the men whose identities were so sensitive the Report's authors thought better of publishing them? Quite literally, the "capiregime," or crewbosses, of the Syrian-Lebanese mafia (more commonly known as the Syrian and Lebanese governments). The first is Maher Asad, Bashar al-Asad's brother and the head of the Republican Guard and intelligence services. The second is Assef Shawkat, Asad's brother-in-law and the Deputy Chief of Military Intelligence. The third, Hassan Khalil, was the head of military intelligence before being replaced by Shawkat. The fourth is Bahjat Suleyman, a friend of Shawkat and one of the three members (along with Asad's brother and Shawkat) of the President's "National Security Committee." The final conspirator is Jamal al-Sayyed, the former Lebanese Security Chief. Together, in the words of one diplomat close to the investigation, they were a Levantine version of "Murder, Inc."

Thanks to Track Changes the Lebanese people and the world community have to confront the fact that the President of Syria likely ordered the hit on their former Prime Minister. But this is not the biggest surprise in the Report. More important is what the Report reveals about the condition of the Syrian economy and political system, which are evidently so desperate Asad and his lieutenants risked everything to whack an increasingly powerful associate who had the temerity to stand up to the Syrian Don...

The comparison with the mafia is more than just a useful heuristic device. For upwards of two centuries the politics and economies of both countries have been run in a manner not dissimilar to Sicily's, with local leaders, or "Za'ims" dispensing patronage, justice and punishment for more powerful lords via a complex matrix of familial and economic relationships whose reach extended beyond the village and into the regional and even world economy. Most important, whether in Palermo or Damascus (or Saddam's Baghdad for that matter), the criminalization of political life allowed those in power to skim the cream off most every economically viable enterprise, private or public, within their territory. And this is ultimately what the assassination of Hariri was about."

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 23:01:20 GMT

Last Chance for Iraq: Former ambassador Peter Galbraith favors separation or loose federation for Iraq, and sees the current constitution as a useful first step in that direction. He's also pessimistic about the new Iraqi armed forces. "President Bush's military strategy for Iraq can be summed up by a phrase in his June 28 speech to the nation: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." According to the Iraqis who run the Ministry of Defense, there is little hope that this will happen soon—or ever.

The Iraqi army nominally has 115 battalions, or 80,000 troops. This figure, often cited by those who see the Iraq occupation as a success, corresponds only to the number of troops listed on the military payroll. However, when the Ministry of Defense decided to supervise the payment of salaries, a third of the payroll was returned. (In Iraq's all-cash economy, commanders receive a lump sum for the troops under their command; this acts as an incentive for them to maintain ghost soldiers on the payroll.) One senior official estimated that barely half the nominal army actually exists.

Claims about weapons provided by the US to the Iraqi army are even more doubtful. Iraqi Ministry of Defense officials say the Americans have not provided them with records of who has been receiving weapons. Without such controls, soldiers sell their weapons on the open market where some are bought by insurgents. Most weapons captured in recent months come, I am told, from stocks supplied to the Iraqi army and police. Craig Smith reported on August 28 in The New York Times that the US military is now unwilling to provide more sophisticated weapons to the Iraqi military for fear they will be used in a civil war—or against the US.

The problems with the Iraqi army go beyond the many opportunities for corruption. In this deeply divided country, people are loyal to their community but not to Iraq, and the army reflects these divisions. Of the 115 army battalions, sixty are made up of Shiites and located in southern Iraq, forty-five are Sunni Arab and stationed in the Sunni governorates, and nine are Kurdish peshmerga, although they are officially described as the part of the Iraqi army stationed in Kurdistan. There is exactly one mixed battalion (with troops contributed from the armed forces of the main political parties) and it is in Baghdad. While the officer corps is a little more heterogeneous, very few Kurds or Shiites are willing to serve as officers of Sunni Arab units fighting Sunni Arab insurgents. There are no Arab officers in the Kurdish battalions, and Kurdistan law prohibits the deployment of the Iraqi army within Kurdistan without permission of the Kurdistan National Assembly.

Even by paying soldiers salaries that are ten times the military salaries under Saddam Hussein, the United States cannot build an Iraqi army when there is no Iraqi nation. The effort should be abandoned in favor of supporting regional security forces. Thanks to their regional armies, Kurdistan and the Shiite south are stable and reasonably secure. A Sunni Arab military force—responsible not to a Shiite-dominated federal government or an American occupation army but to Sunni officers and a Sunni Arab political authority—is the best hope of combating the Sunni Arab insurgency and its jihadist allies. "

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:45:28 GMT

'The System Worked': Interesting response from Holbrooke, suggesting an earlier departure by moderates would have helped. "[Wilkerson's] the speech should remind journalists that they failed to dig enough; the outlines of the high-stakes struggle were widely known but vastly underreported..

I am certainly not going to defend Cheney or Rumsfeld. They made mistakes of historic proportions in Iraq and elsewhere, and the damage done to America's world role in the past four years will, I believe, take a decade to undo. But for Wilkerson to describe major policy mistakes as the result of a process that was dysfunctional -- even though it was -- is inaccurate. In the end, presidents get the advice they deserve, from the advisers they pick. .. Bush was surely aware that there were two views in his administration on most critical issues, but the buck stopped on his desk. Apparently, Cheney's voice was often the most influential, but Bush made the final calls. As Les Gelb wrote about Vietnam with deliberate irony, "the system worked," but it produced the wrong outcome. ..

The "evil influence" theory Wilkerson laid out is fun to read and surely reflects Powell's feelings, but it does not explain how a national hero universally respected for his decency and integrity, and whose approval ratings were 30 points higher than those of Bush, could lose so many of the big battles. Powell's supporters often offer the "effective trap" explanation for why he stayed, the same one Robert S. McNamara gave for staying in the Johnson administration for two years after he had concluded that the Vietnam War was unwinnable: Things would have been much worse if he had abandoned ship. But that argument is no more valid today than it was in 1968 (when McNamara's successor, Clark Clifford, helped turn policy around). ..

In recent moves rich with irony, secretary [Rice] has improved many first-term policies, in such places as North Korea, Iran, Bosnia and Kosovo, and in relations with some of our major European allies. (Powell's friends say with bitterness that when he proposed similar policies, he was thwarted, in part, by her.) .. Not everything is better in the second term. [But] the immensely disciplined Rice is seeking to undo damage done in the past four years without ever admitting there was any -- a nifty bit of cognitive dissonance, but one she seems determined to pull off. Events have, of course, pushed her and the president in this direction, and it is easier with Feith and Paul Wolfowitz gone. But -- and this may be the most painful irony of all -- Powell's departure opened the door to somewhat more pragmatic policies, which Bush and the "cabalists" had been opposing."

In a related vein, Matthew Yglesias writes "Richard Clarke, by contrast, offered a study in trying to do the right thing when it mattered."

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:14:13 GMT

The White House cabal: Wilkerson gets more specific. "IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. .. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal. Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. ..

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well. .. Such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush. ..

The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough, of course, but it helped."

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 02:06:53 GMT

FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations: "The FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight, according to previously classified documents to be released today. Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view. ..

Case numbers on the documents indicate that a minimum of 287 potential violations were identified by the FBI [referred to the Intelligence Oversight Board] during those three years [2002-4], but the actual number is certainly higher because the records are incomplete. .. More than 1,700 new cases were opened by the court last year, according to an administration report to Congress. ..

[Potential violations] included a violation of bank privacy statutes and an improper physical search, though the details of the transgressions are edited out. At least two others involve e-mails that were improperly collected after the authority to do so had expired."

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:44:11 GMT

The Year of Rewards: Penestanan 2: When I travelled in Africa and Asia in the 80s, I shot a lot of slides. I dreamed then of a digital future where my camera would record sound as well as pictures, and where I could annotate the recordings and beam them out to my friends at home in real time. Even in 1983 you could see it would come, eventually. Now, here's a fine example from my friend David Lincoln. Today he's in Bali, taking a walk with villagers in their rice paddies.

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:53:25 GMT

Ex-Powell aide assails Bush's foreign policy: "Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Powell at the State Department from 2002 to early 2005 [as chief of staff] .. has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" and that President George W. Bush had left the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises. .. "I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita .." He suggested that dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence." ..

The retired colonel referred to Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations - and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had.""

Here's the transcript of the speech, worth reading. "Decisions that send men and women to die, .. decisions that confront situations like natural disasters .. should not be made in a secret way. That’s a very, very provocative statement, I think. All my life I’ve been taught to guard the nation’s secrets. All my life I have followed the rules. .. I understand that the nation’s secrets need guarding, but fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret. ..

Dr. Rice .. made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president. .. What we had was a situation where the national security advisor, seen in the evolution over some half-century since the act as the balancer or the person who would make sure all opinions got to the president, the person who would make sure that every dissent got to the president that made .. actually was a part of the problem, and probably on many issues sided with the president and the vice president and the secretary of Defense."

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 17:05:45 GMT

Interview: Juan Cole on George Bush's Iraq: A good rundown on the situation inside Iraq, plus comments on the origins of the war. "When we as historians get access to all the documents and can figure out how this thing was planned and who supported it, I think we'll find that the Bush administration was a coalition of various forces and each part of the coalition had its own reasons for wanting to fight this war. The group most explored has been the neoconservatives, but I suspect they will bulk less large in our final estimation of the promotion of the war. .. They may also have been fall guys. When things started going bad, more stuff got leaked about what they had been saying than about others.

I suspect it will come out that George W. Bush had wanted an Iraq War since he was governor of Texas .. The degree to which Bush himself has been a central, policy-making player somehow gets elided in American discourse. It's not as if he's a leaf blown by the wind. When the Bush presidency is finally examined from the primary documents, a lot of the things that are attributed to the number three man at the Pentagon may actually turn out to have been Bush's idea from the beginning, and something he pushed hard for. His personal style is to play it by ear. .. The world is a much more complex and vicious place [than Texas], and there are often incommensurate issues for which there is no acceptable compromise. Trying to run the world the way you run Texas is a big mistake. "

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 18:00:02 GMT

Recipe for Destruction: So Kurzweil and Joy agree on this; they disagree on other advanced tech issues. "To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous. ..

We urgently need international agreements by scientific organizations to limit such publications and an international dialogue on the best approach to preventing recipes for weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands. Part of that discussion should concern the appropriate role of governments, scientists and their scientific societies, and industry.

We also need a new Manhattan Project to develop specific defenses against new biological viral threats, natural or human made. There are promising new technologies, like RNA interference, that could be harnessed. We need to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale." I'd like to learn more about RNA interference and other biodefense technologies.

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:48:57 GMT

Questions of Character: A must-read article by Krugman. "Right now, with the Bush administration in meltdown on multiple issues, we're hearing a lot about President Bush's personal failings. But what happened to the commanding figure of yore, the heroic leader in the war on terror? The answer, of course, is that the commanding figure never existed: Mr. Bush is the same man he always was. All the character flaws that are now fodder for late-night humor were fully visible, for those willing to see them, during the 2000 campaign.

And President Bush the great leader is far from the only fictional character, bearing no resemblance to the real man, created by media images. Read the speeches Howard Dean gave before the Iraq war, and compare them with Colin Powell's pro-war presentation to the U.N. Knowing what we know now, it's clear that one man was judicious and realistic, while the other was spinning crazy conspiracy theories. But somehow their labels got switched in the way they were presented to the public by the news media. ..

[Why? It is] all too easy for coverage to be shaped by what reporters feel they can safely say, rather than what they actually think or know. .. Let's be frank: the Bush administration has made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. ..

What we really need is political journalism based less on perceptions of personalities and more on actual facts. Schadenfreude aside, we should not be happy that stories about Mr. Bush's boldness have given way to stories analyzing his facial tics. Think, instead, about how different the world would be today if, during the 2000 campaign, reporting had focused on the candidates' fiscal policies instead of their wardrobes. "

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 01:31:04 GMT

News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid: Inventory of stories of violence after the flood in New Orleans, and how nearly all of them were false.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 22:20:03 GMT

HOWL: "When Allen Ginsberg hurled his shattering poem at a San Francisco audience in 1955, it proved to be the depth charge that started the Beat movement." Oct 7 is the fiftieth anniversary. Also, an appreciation from the UK, Howls to mark the birth of Beat.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 01:43:35 GMT

Saddam's Revenge: Excellent summary article in Time by Joe Klein. "The history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart."

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:36:32 GMT

Bill Clinton, Beyond the White House: Tina Brown captures some of the spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative (which now has photos and transcripts online). "This wasn't just the usual FOBs from Park Avenue and Hollywood (though there were plenty of those cruising around). With so many world policy chiefs present -- Tony Blair, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Condi Rice, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, even Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, for heaven's sake -- the conference was a tour d'horizon of Clinton's life, and head, since the White House. (So that's what he's been doing on all those far-flung speaking gigs -- scarfing down public policy from the global minibar.) No one has figured out before how to leverage a post-presidency like this. Jimmy Carter's version has been about the power of example. Clinton's is about the power of power. He's been everywhere, met everyone (my favorite Clintonian aside: "As someone who went to Nigeria to plead for the life of a woman condemned under sharia law, I thank you for doing this."). Now he's putting that Rolodex to work for something bigger than the next campaign. ..

Unlike Davos and other high-octane gabfests, however, Clinton's conference wasn't just about elephant bumping. For every VIP there was some earnest activist or intellectual who has caught his eye.

Clinton seems to have found his role as facilitator-in-chief, urging us to give up our deadly national passivity and start thinking things through for ourselves. Commandeering the role of government through civic action suddenly feels like a very empowering notion ..

The White House doesn't seem to realize it yet, but we are entering a post-spin era in public life. The shift has long been underway in the business world, propelled by the Enron catastrophe and the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Process, not perception, is king in boardrooms today. After so much corporate malfeasance it all got too dire to put up with fake CEOs anymore. Now after the Iraq debacle, the ballooning deficit and the aftermath of Katrina, Americans are pining for grounded leaders in public office, too -- leaders who have moral conviction, yes, but also the gnarly, dexterous ability to think things through."

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:24:58 GMT

Insurgents 'inside Iraqi police': "Insurgents have infiltrated Iraq's security services, National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie has admitted.
Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, he said he had no idea how far the services had been undermined, with problems "in many parts of Iraq". It comes after the British Army said it was forced to take action to free two UK soldiers after learning Iraqi police had handed them to a militia group... Iraq's interior ministry ordered the police force in Basra to release the soldiers - but that order was ignored. ..

Colonel Bill Dunham, the chief of staff for the multinational force in Basra, told BBC radio the infiltration of insurgents into Iraq's security forces was a problem across Iraq. A report released by the US defence department in July blamed the problem on poor vetting procedures and recommended that the quality of records at Iraq's interior ministry be checked. "

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 04:26:21 GMT

You Say Okjeryok, I Say Deterrent: From Tong Kim, recently retired from the State Department, where he was the senior Korean interpreter for high-level meetings involving U.S. officials, now at Korea University in Seoul. "In contrast to the American media description of North Korea as a "Stalinist Communist state," I have come to see it as a Confucian nationalist monarchy, based on traditional Korean values and reflecting the bitterness born of foreign invasions throughout Korean history. In Confucian society, loyalty to the ruler and respect for elders are basic tenets. The iconic stature of the late "great leader" Kim Il Sung isn't that different from the Confucian image of a divine ruler. .. Recently the younger Kim said that denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was the last wish of his father; I think he really believes that carrying out his father's will is his filial duty in the Korean tradition."

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 05:30:41 GMT

Clinton Global Initiative, 9/17/05: I posted some photos from the event. I felt a bit conspicuous taking photos, so it's far from comprehensive, mostly just the receptions, but it might give a little flavor of it. (And there's a few shots from a Climate Group reception the night before, and a show at the Vanguard the night after the conference.)

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:09:00 GMT

Don't Ignore Western Europe: "Western Europe is a core recruiting ground for Muslim terrorists that is being overlooked given the U.S. focus on Iraq and the Middle East, according to Francis Fukuyama, academic dean of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. The failure of European countries to assimilate their large and growing Muslim populations in the era of globalization has caused an alienation among the young that has created a "hard core for terrorism," Fukuyama said in Washington at a bipartisan policy forum on terrorism and security, sponsored by the New America Foundation.

"Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem. It is a West European problem, too," Fukuyama said. He pointed out that the leaders of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks came out of a cell in Hamburg and that most of the extremists participating in the more recent bombings in Spain and England were born in those countries. Fukuyama's analysis squares with recent CIA conclusions about the importance of Western Europe, where, as one former senior intelligence official put it yesterday, "there are 10 million Muslims . . . that are not integrated into their societies."

Fukuyama called this one area of the war against terrorism in which U.S. and European interests merge and joint cooperation has begun to be productive. The Europeans "need to understand American assimilation" because their approach of "multiculturalism has been a failure," Fukuyama said"

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 17:09:18 GMT

Taking Stock of the Forever War: Excellent long NYT article on the strategy and successes of Al Queda. Strong parallels to the guerilla strategies of the Irgun against the British in Palestine, and the American provocation of the Soviets to draw them into Afghanistan. To the future: " truly democratic Iraq was always likely to be an Iraq led not only by Shia, who are the majority of Iraqis, but by those Shia parties that are the largest and best organized - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Islamic Party - which happen to be those blessed by the religious authorities and nurtured in Iran. Nor would it be a surprise if a democratic Saudi Arabia turned out to be a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and one much less friendly to the United States. Osama bin Laden knows this, and so do American officials. This is why the United States is "friendly" with "apostate regimes." Democratic outcomes do not always ensure friendly governments. Often the contrary is true. On this simple fact depends much of the history of American policy not only in the Middle East but also in Latin America and other parts of the world throughout the cold war. Bush administration officials, for all their ideological fervor, did the country no favor by ignoring it. ..

Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer who has studied the structure of the network, has written. "The movement has now degenerated into something like the Internet. Spontaneous groups of friends, as in Madrid and Casablanca, who have few links to any central leadership, are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training." Under this view, Al Qaeda, in the form we knew it, has been subsumed into the broader, more diffuse political world of radical Salafi politics. "The network is now self-organized from the bottom up and is very decentralized," Sageman wrote. "With local initiative and flexibility, it's very robust." We have entered the era of the amateurs. ..

Attacks staged by amateurs with little or no connection to terrorist networks, and thus no visible trail to follow, are nearly impossible to prevent, even for the United States, with all of its power. Indeed, perhaps what is most astonishing about these hard four years is that we have managed to show the world the limits of our power. In launching a war on Iraq that we have been unable to win, we have done the one thing a leader is supposed never to do: issue a command that is not followed. A withdrawal from Iraq, rapid or slow, with the Islamists still holding the field, will signal, as bin Laden anticipated, a failure of American will. Those who will view such a withdrawal as the critical first step in a broader retreat from the Middle East will surely be encouraged to go on the attack. "

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:28:45 GMT

Privatized Global Problem Solving, Care of Clinton Alumni: Early coverage of the end of the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York: "the first meeting of the former president's Clinton Global Initiative, which drew about 2,000 government, business and civic leaders, was surprisingly devoid of nostalgia or recrimination. The conference's dominant ethos seemed to be: If we are out of power, let's see what else we can do to advance our priorities. As it turned out, the answer looked to be: quite a lot. ..

The commitments were as diverse as the audience. Michael Jordan's mother said her foundation would build a hospital for women and children in Nairobi, Kenya. Sir Tom Hunter, a charismatic, bullet-headed Scottish businessman, pledged $100 million to create comprehensive development plans for two poor countries with the aim of producing models that could be replicated elsewhere. Starbucks said that by 2007 it would buy a majority of its coffee at premium prices from growers who used environmentally sound methods and equitably compensated small farmers. Cellphone service for the Gaza Strip, a $100-million investment fund for African business, a $300-million capital fund for clean-energy technologies in Europe, programs for young girls in Bangladesh and Brazil and for AIDS orphans in Africa — all made the list. Late Saturday, Clinton put the total at 190 commitments valued, on paper, at $1.25 billion. ..

As [Clinton] has recognized, nonprofit groups and like-minded corporate executives have never believed more in their ability to influence global problems, with or without government sanction. Nor have governments ever looked more to the assistance of private players. "

I attended the CGI. It felt like a meeting of a global civil society, with NGO's and business best represented, followed by governments, media and even celebrities. I learned a lot, and heard a number of novel ideas, which I'll blog as time permits in the coming week.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:32:02 GMT

Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale: "In a paper in the June 29 [2005] issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro - lab grown -- meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat," says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat. "Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn't need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat." ..

"cultured meat could appeal to people concerned about food safety, the environment, and animal welfare, and people who want to tailor food to their individual tastes," says Matheny. The paper even suggests that meat makers may one day sit next to bread makers on the kitchen counter. "The benefits could be enormous," Matheny says. "The demand for meat is increasing world wide -- China 's meat demand is doubling every ten years. Poultry consumption in India has doubled in the last five years. ..

Matheny saw so many advantages in the idea that he joined several other scientists in starting a nonprofit, New Harvest, to advance the technology. One of these scientists, Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Science at Utrecht University, received a grant from the Dutch government to produce cultured meat, as part of a national initiative to reduce the environmental impact of food production."

Added implication: "Writing in this month’s Physics World, British physicist Alan Calvert calculated that the animals eaten by people produce 21 percent of the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity."

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:10:59 GMT

WHO chief won't push for generic bird flu drug: "Speaking at a conference of health ministers and experts from more than 20 countries, Director-General Lee Jong-wook said WHO wouldn't pressure Swiss-based Roche Holding AG to relinquish its patent on oseltamivir. Sold under the brand name Tamiflu, it is the only treatment so far proven effective against bird flu in humans.

Last month, Roche announced it would donate 3 million treatment courses of Tamiflu to a WHO-managed stockpile. .. "When a company is doing its part, it (pushing for a generic option) is not a good incentive, encouragement (for the company) to do more," Lee told The Associated Press. .. "We are very keen to see generic versions of this anti-viral drug available, but we will not pressure Roche to do so (relinquish its patent)," said Peter Cordingley, a WHO spokesman. ..

Bird flu has claimed 63 lives in Asia – mostly in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia – and ravaged the region's poultry stocks. Health officials in parts of Russia and Kazakhstan are also monitoring its spread. Most human cases have been traced to direct contact with infected birds, but Lee said it was "just a matter of time" before the virus mutates into a form that is transmissible between humans, possibly killing millions of people. "It will come," Lee said. "All the conditions are there." "

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:42:30 GMT

How the Wall Street Journal and Rep. Barton celebrated a global-warming skeptic: How the mainstream media is easily corrupted by ideology and well-funded lobbyists.

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 17:38:49 GMT

The Suicide Solution: Christopher Dickey compares epidemics of suicide in different cultures, applied to today's terrorists. "In “Dying to Win,” Pape concludes that “suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation.” Whether the people blowing themselves up are Palestinians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Tamil Tigers, or for that matter Japanese kamikazes, they are part of nationalist struggles, he says, and “they see themselves as sacrificing their lives for the nation’s good”..” Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and he holds on to this essentially political explanation even when it has to be stretched a bit. Did the problem of occupation loom large in the lives of the young British-raised Pakistanis and East Africans who attacked public transport in London last July? Where did occupation figure in the minds of the highly educated men from Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who carried out the 9/11 attacks against the United States? .. Al Qaeda propaganda tells them that the ummah, the global nation of all Muslims, is under attack. .. But that perception is not new—and suicide bombings on this scale are. ..

“Once a specific form of suicide takes place, it becomes part of the thinking and, if you will, the repertoire of people who can identify with that person who killed himself,” says the Dutch researcher René Diekstra, now at Holland’s Roosevelt Academy. “We know that what we call ‘suicide contagion’ is particularly prevalent in the late teens and early adult age. There is a search for identity, and for heroism.” These are exactly the themes the suicide organizers exploit. ..

Over the long run, Diekstra argues, Muslim societies will have to change. Islam will have to reaffirm its traditional values to resist the romance of martyrdom that more and more young people find attractive. New role models for young Muslims will have to be found, publicized, and revered. But the first step in any such process, as Pape argues, is to end foreign occupations wherever possible..

In the 1980s you had some six million Palestinians and Lebanese under Israeli occupation. Now some 20 million Iraqis (especially the 5 million Sunni Arabs) feel themselves under U.S. occupation—plus 18 million Saudis and some 2 million Kuwaitis who may see themselves as threatened by foreign troops in their neighborhood. “If we ever decide to invade Iran,” says Pape, “we’re going to discover that 70 million people can provide a lot more suicide bombers.” To stop the spread of the suicide disease, in other words, we have to stop the spread of the occupation disease."

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 01:35:32 GMT

Catastrophic success: "Wolfowitz is the Mr. Magoo of American foreign policy. Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind. .. The problem with Paul Wolfowitz isn't that he's an evil genius -- it's that he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years." Many details.

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 22:01:41 GMT

Predictions of the New Orlease flood: Quoting Time magazine in 2000, NPR in 2002, and other sources.

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 07:36:54 GMT

The Monopoly Factory: How and why the patent office grants many spurious patents, with examples of the costs to society, and how to fix the system.

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 07:04:23 GMT

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? "Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near [New Orleans'] 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake. ..

When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. .. In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness. On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." ..

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history... [A] "study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said." ..

One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need.""

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 07:55:15 GMT

The Observer: Iraq takes a step closer to civil war: "it appears it was not the Shias, as Bush feared, but the Sunnis who have torpedoed consensus on the constitution, first forcing a number of concessions from the Shias, then deciding to walk out on the whole process. 'The Sunnis made the tactical decision to negotiate for as much as they could get out of the document and then walk out to protect their own positions within their community,' said one diplomat. 'It is a dangerous tactic. It will take a lot of patching up.'..

While Bush could pick up the phone to try to cajole or mollify Hakim as a representative of Shia desires, on the Sunni side, despite more than two years of effort, there is no one of a similar stature and influence to call. ..

pessimism has been reflected in the new and chilling conversation that has repeatedly taken place among government and intelligence officials in the past few weeks on both sides of the Atlantic - how do you know when you are on the brink of civil war? And which, out of the available models, Iraq might follow if it follows down that path. It is not Vietnam that officials are looking to for their model of a worst-case scenario in Iraq, but to the fratricide of Lebanon's civil war."

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 07:41:53 GMT

Juan Cole on success and frustration in Iraq: "Sullivan says that given US and British forces on the ground, the "insurgency" "cannot win." The problem is that the "insurgency" doesn't have to win in order to succeed. All it has to do is spoil everyone else's successes. By sabotaging the oil pipelines and the electricity grid that supports them, the guerrillas have reduced Iraqi government revenue by a third to a half of what it otherwise would be. They can go on doing that a very long time. They have put the lives of every senior member of the new government in danger, and have managed to assassinate a whole roster of high-ranking officials, even two members of the new parliament and two members of the constitution drafting committee.

They have kept the new government, and even the US military, from truly controlling the major Sunni Arab cities, and have even made mixed cities such as Baqubah big security problems. They have increasingly succeeded in provoking deep hatred between Sunni and Shiite Arabs, contributing to a low-intensity, uncoventional war between the two that seemed unlikely as recently as a year ago. These tactics are proving successful and can be maintained for a very long time." The article also makes some predictions for 2006.

In a similar vein from Cole's March 05 op-ed, U.S. Caught in the Crossfire: "For all of these reasons, the United States will increasingly find its hands tied in Iraq. Caught between a popularly elected government dominated by fundamentalist Shiites and a determined guerrilla movement led by Arab nationalists and radical Sunnis, the United States is left without a safe and secure escape hatch."

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 21:02:16 GMT

Sunnis offer an exit plan: "Largely unnoticed amid the U.S. political debate, al-Rawi and other Sunni leaders close to the insurgency have reached tacit consensus over the broad outline of an interim program to reduce the violence, stabilize the country and thus enable the U.S.-led coalition troops to begin a gradual withdrawal. While differences remain on some points, there is wide agreement on these steps:

-- A troop pullout from most urban areas and an end to military checkpoints and raids. "The Americans and British must leave all residential areas," said al-Rawi. ..

-- Overhaul of the Iraqi Army and National Guard... Sunni Arabs point out that these two institutions are almost completely composed of members of their ethnic enemies -- the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite militias. "These people want to humiliate the Sunni," al-Hashimi said. "The Army and National Guard must be professionalized. They cannot be dominated by members of the party militias." ..

-- Release of prisoners. The number of Iraqi prisoners in American military custody has grown rapidly in recent months, with as many as 15,000 Iraqis behind bars, according to U.S. estimates. Military officials have admitted that many of the prisoners have simply been swept up in neighborhood roundups. Because there is no formal trial process, the process of vetting prisoners and releasing those found innocent is very slow. Military officials have reportedly expressed worry that the sprawling prison camps are serving as recruiting camps for al Qaeda and the most extremist insurgent groups. .. Nadhmi and other Iraqis interviewed for this article said they did not advocate release of Saddam Hussein or others accused of involvement in killings and torture. ..

-- Negotiations with the "resistance." Sunni leaders have frequently met with U.S. officials in Baghdad to try to coax them to talk with the guerrillas. They draw a line between what they call the "resistance," by which they mean Iraqi fighters who attack only U.S. and Iraqi troops, and the Sunni extremists linked to al Qaeda who have spread terror with car bombs and suicide attacks against Shiite civilians. A big problem, however, is figuring out which insurgent groups to approach. The Sunni Arab leaders consulted for this article estimated the number of insurgent organizations as ranging from 12 to 35 -- not including foreign groups. ..

"We realize that it will take a long time for the Americans to leave. We cannot say six months or 12 months, because we may have to change the plan when the situation changes. If the Americans start taking real steps, if the Iraqi people feel that they will no longer be occupied, they will say with one voice to the terrorists, 'Please leave us.' And they will go," he said.

"But in this situation now, when the troops are even in our universities, our mosques, our houses, it is impossible." "

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:53:02 GMT

How to exit Iraq: Juan Cole's 10-point plan.

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:43:29 GMT

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 06:48:27 GMT

H5N1 seen spreading: "A bird flu outbreak in seven northern Kazakh villages is dangerous to humans and threatening the west of the sprawling country, the Agriculture Ministry said yesterday. .. ``The western region is now in the risk zone because migratory birds are starting to fly to the Caspian Sea and Urals-Caspian basin,'' he said. The outbreak spread from Siberia in neighbouring Russia.. Although the H5N1 strain has killed more than 50 people in Asia since 2003, no one has caught it in Russia or Kazakhstan. ..

Since its discovery on a farm in Siberia in mid-July, bird flu has spread to other areas in Russia. More than 130,000 birds have been culled in order to try to prevent further contagion. Another 11,715 birds died of the virus, the Russian Emergencies Ministry said in a report yesterday. In Kazakhstan, at least 9,000 birds have died or been destroyed since the outbreak started in the north of the Central Asian state last month."

Meanwhile, The EU battens down hatches against bird flu: "Dutch poultry farmers have complied with a government order to move all their birds indoors, as Europe steps up its efforts to prevent a potentially deadly bird flu pandemic this northern winter. Germany plans to follow suit by ordering that all free-range birds be moved indoors next month to prevent contact with birds arriving from the east that may be carrying the virus. .. All EU states are monitoring poultry health closely and stocking vaccines for use in the event of an epidemic. At the weekend, Italy announced stricter import controls, heightened surveillance and accelerated vaccine production. .. [H5N1] has been moving steadily westwards. It has reached Siberia and experts are saying that migratory fowl could bring it to western Europe this northern autumn. "

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:30:19 GMT

Scientists Race To Head Off Lethal Potential Of Avian Flu: More details, esp. on the science of avian flu transmission. "The [2002] discovery by Hulse and Webster led, in part, to an extreme program Thailand mounted last November. About 70,000 investigators went into every village in the country looking for sick ducks and sampling the feces of healthy-looking ones. Flocks carrying H5N1 influenza virus were killed. The strategy appears to have worked. Last year, Thailand had 12 human deaths from H5N1 flu. So far this year, it has had none...

The world, Webster believes,would be well advised to draw up a plan to limit human movement and distribute vaccine and antiviral drugs should a pandemic flu strain emerge despite the efforts to prevent it."

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 23:32:44 GMT

How to make a terrorist, and the response: Fine short summary from Juan Cole.

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:08:34 GMT

Akamai monitors news activity: Web page shows spikes in news reading, by story: "It's debatable how big a deal any specific news event is compared to all the other human mayhem that occurs each day. .. A news mapping service introduced on Thursday by Akamai Technologies Inc. promises to give unprecedented insight into the relative hunger that millions of Internet users have to learn of breaking events minute-by-minute. Akamai, which helps speed delivery of 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic over its network, is looking to count the sum of page requests across 100 major news sites it serves to rank interest in major events on a scale never seen before."

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 17:54:25 GMT

Perverse results: "The results of the war have so far been utterly perverse. Not only wasn’t Iraq actively developing weapons of mass destruction; the invasion gave Iran all the more incentive to pursue its own nuclear program so it would not someday suffer the same fate as its neighbor -- and it has now broken off negotiations with the Europeans over that program and resumed processing nuclear fuel. That our intervention has inadvertently brought pro-Iranian parties to power in Iraq only adds to the irony. The great neoconservative hope was that the war would create a new political dynamic in the region that would favor pro-Western democracy. In fact, we have changed politics in the region -- in favor of Iran, just at the time that country has moved toward a more conservative, hard-line, Islamic government.

And the list of perverse effects of the war doesn’t end there. By occupying Iraq, we have provided the insurgency its sustaining passion. Rather than stopping terrorism, we have stoked it. We sought to demonstrate American power, and we have ended up demonstrating its limits. ..

Recently, after stepping down as chief of Australia's armed forces, General Peter Cosgrove called for foreign troops to quit Iraq by the end of 2006 so 'we take one of the focal points of terrorist motivation away, and that is foreign troops.' "

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 04:33:32 GMT

The Africa You Never See: Africa, "according to the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct foreign investment, [yet] it attracts the least. Unless investors see the Africa that's worthy of investment, they won't put their money into it. .. Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list of the world's highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+ credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar and Citibank have invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish on the future.

The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional caricature of a complex continent. .. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.

Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations. [In Somalia] private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no government intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the latest satellite phone technology. The electricity works. When the state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went out of business. Today, there are five private carriers and price wars keep the cost of tickets down. .. Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance -- or even just some governance -- but it's also true that, through resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a functioning society.

Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure, but the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It just costs them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell phones are filling the gap. .. As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the future of the continent. "

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:04:44 GMT

Are We Prepared for Avian Flu?: An interview with "Laurie Garrett, the only reporter to win all three of journalism's big "P" awards (the Peabody, the Polk and the Pulitzer) .. resigned from Newsday earlier this year [citing] a deteriorating climate for journalism .. Today, Garrett is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her story "The Next Pandemic?" was published in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs ..

"Avian influenza comes from aquatic birds, including migratory ducks, geese and herons. The loss of these birds' migratory routes in China has brought them into direct contact with humans in farms and parks. In this way, influenza is spread from migrating birds to domestic birds, then to pigs and ultimately to humans. This chain of events involves veterinary science, ecology and medicine, the triumvirate studied by the science of conservation medicine." One general issue: we lack "respectful mutual lines of communication between those protecting human health, those protecting animal health and those dealing with ecology."

On avian flu response specifically: "I think the CDC is doing a lot. But what I keep trying to get across to people is that flu starts in Asia. We're a lot better off if we can stop it in Asia than if we wait until it is here and try to figure out some means to minimize the damage. And that means a whole lot more multinational agreements, and this is difficult at a time when our Congress is full of members saying really terrible things about China [and Vietnam]..

In a recent study published in Nature, a team at Oxford University did a computer model just simply asking if it is possible to stop pandemic flu. And the good news is their answer is yes, it is possible, but the bad news is it can be stopped only if you identify it when there are just 30 human cases. Well, we're not going to spot those first 30 human cases before it spreads to hundreds or thousands of people unless we have a much better infrastructure of public health, vigilance and surveillance in poor countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and in countries with more money but completely lacking in sophisticated public health infrastructure, like China." "

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:38:24 GMT

Trading Cricket for Jihad: "We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science. .. these men are, far from being medieval, drawn from the ranks of the educated, the mobile and the multilingual. .. The jihadists are modern psychologically as well as demographically because they are self-made men (in traditional societies there are no self-made men). Rather than deferring to custom, many of them have rebelled against local authority figures .. They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning. ..

In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced. In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism). .. Roy emphasizes that the jihadists are the products of globalization, and its enemies. ..

The first implication, clearly, is that democratizing the Middle East, while worthy in itself, may not stem terrorism. .. Second, the jihadists' weakness is that they do not spring organically from the Arab or Muslim world. They claim to speak for the Muslim masses, as earlier radicals claimed to speak for the proletariat. But they don't. Surely a key goal for U.S. policy should be to isolate the nationalists from the jihadists. Third, terrorism is an immigration problem. .. Countries that do not encourage assimilation are not only causing themselves trouble, but endangering others around the world as well. "

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:32:53 GMT

G.M. Thrives in China With Small, Thrifty Vans: "In this obscure corner of southern China, General Motors seems to have hit on a hot new formula: $5,000 minivans that get 43 miles to the gallon in city driving. That combination of advantages has captivated Chinese buyers, propelling G.M. into the leading spot in this nascent car market. ..

The minivans, which G.M. builds in a joint venture with a Chinese partner, have a quarter the horsepower of American minivans, weak acceleration and a top speed of 81 miles an hour. The seats are only a third the thickness of seats in Western models but look plush compared with some Chinese cars. ..

The utilitarian minivans and pickups are mainly purchased in China by small-business owners in towns and smaller cities, who drive them both to carry supplies for their businesses and to transport their families. .. The minivans have been a big hit, helping G.M. sell more than 170,000 very small vehicles - automobile types not available in the United States - and to pass Volkswagen this year in sales in a market that VW has dominated for two decades. They have helped turn China into G.M.'s biggest center of automotive profit - in contrast to losses in manufacturing operations in the United States - and its second-largest market in terms of the number of vehicles sold, after the United States...

The Chinese government has also encouraged a shift toward more efficient models through stringent fuel-economy regulations, even as Congress has opted for more subsidies for oil production and a limit on hybrid car subsidies .."

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 02:16:13 GMT

Terror views of Indonesians changed by tsunami relief: "In the first substantial shift of public opinion in the Muslim world since the beginning of the United States’ global war on terrorism, more people in the world’s largest Muslim country now favor American efforts against terrorism than oppose them. This is just one of many dramatic findings of a new nationwide poll in Indonesia conducted February 1-6, 2005 ..

For the first time ever in a major Muslim nation, more people favor US-led efforts to fight terrorism than oppose them (40% to 36%). Importantly, those who oppose US efforts against terrorism have declined by half, from 72% in 2003 to just 36% today.
For the first time ever in a Muslim nation since 9/11, support for Osama Bin Laden has dropped significantly (58% favorable to just 23%).
65% of Indonesians now are more favorable to the United States because of the American response to the tsunami, with the highest percentage among people under 30."

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:42:35 GMT

Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action: Richard A. Clarke and others released this report in November 2004. The Summary of the Recommendations is worth reading: "We argue that the threat is not terrorism, nor even all terrorist organizations, but rather jihadist terrorists, who seek to hijack Islam and use violence to replace existing governments with non-democratic theocracies. In most predominately Muslim nations, these affiliated jihadist groups seek to overthrow the existing government .. In Islamic countries, the jihadists seek to expel non-Muslims and non-Muslim influences. In nations where Muslims are in the minority, jihadists seek to create sub-cultures that are insulated from the nations and societies in which they exist. Often they also use their presence in these nations as a base for propaganda, recruitment, fundraising, and terrorism aimed at influencing the host governments. ..

There is disagreement as to whether jihadists are motivated chiefly by U.S. actions, such as the invasion of Iraq or U.S. support to Israel, or by their desire to create theocratic governments. Jihadists successfully employ criticism of U.S. policies to widen their support. Whether or not the U.S. were in Iraq or Israel in the West Bank, however, the core jihadists would still seek to overthrow existing regimes to create theocracies, and would target the U.S. because American support of existing Islamic governments makes that goal harder to achieve. ..

Since 9/11 Washington has provided only $516 million dollars towards the $5.6 billion the Coast Guard estimates U.S. ports need to make them minimally secure. In the FY2005 budget, the White House asked for just $50 million more. ..

The $155 million appropriated by Congress for [rail security] is about 1% of the funding appropriated for aviation security, though 16 times as many people travel by public transportation every day than by air. The next administration has the opportunity to play a critical role in this process by ensuring the passage of a block grant program dedicated to enhancing transit system security, focusing in particular on subways, commuter trains, and Amtrak railways...

Today, there are 123 chemical plants in this nation that, if attacked, could threaten up to one million people each. Yet there is no requirement to secure these plants. A Government Accounting Office (GAO) report released in March 2003 noted that even though U.S. chemical facilities were “attractive targets for terrorists,” the ability of any facility to respond to an attack was “unknown.” GAO found that the chemical industry was not required by law to assess vulnerabilities or take action to secure its facilities, and that “the federal government has not comprehensively assessed the chemical industry’s vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks.”.. "

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 19:33:34 GMT

Osama bin Laden's Heir By Alexis Debat: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as Osama bin Laden's replacement, and Iraq as a replacement for jihads Afghan base.

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:22:13 GMT

Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq "New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself. The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central front" in a battle against the United States...

interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."..

American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al Qaeda did four years ago, but are part of a new generation of terrorists.."

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 07:30:17 GMT

"War by Video Conference" by Phillip Carter: Account of how key battles in Afghanistan were handled - remotely. "Perhaps the biggest problem was the Rube Goldberg command structure created by Gen. Franks. The war was run from Tampa, Fla., 7,000 miles and 10 time zones away by video teleconferencing. Decisions were made by committee and on Eastern Standard Time, often with an eye towards how the decisions would be briefed to the press at the Pentagon. Naylor quotes a deputy commanding general's priceless description of the SecDef's daily press briefing: "When SecDef started having a [press] briefing every day, it meant that for hours of that day you could not talk to the CENTCOM staff… . For hours of the day you were unable to get to a senior person to make a decision at CENTCOM because they were tied up prepping themselves for the SecDef's briefing." "

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:39:35 GMT

Guerrillas in Iraq Refocus and Strengthen: "In Baghdad, it is commonly understood that the recent success of the insurgency lies in part in the weakness of the Iraqi government. The Sunni leaders who were slain, for instance, were traveling with a single guard, whom one of the Sunni leaders had provided at his own expense. Pleas by the two Sunni leaders to the Iraqi government for protection had apparently gone unheeded. And in the case of the bombing in Musayyib, Iraqi officials said the gas truck, owned by the Oil Ministry, had been hijacked by insurgents on its way from Baghdad to Falluja several days before the bombing. To get to Musayyib, the truck probably passed through numerous military and police checkpoints, yet somehow, it reached its destination. ..

Still, part of the explanation for the insurgents' resiliency stems from their own shrewdness. American commanders believe that the rash of diplomat kidnappings came after the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi formed a cell in Baghdad specifically for abducting diplomats."

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 08:43:37 GMT

The World Is Round: Interesting critique of Thomas Friedman's globalization and nationalism, with connections to Karl Marx, the fall of the Soviet Union, and more. "Globalization makes the world smaller. It may also make it—or sections of it—richer. It does not make it more peaceful, or more liberal. Least of all does it make it flat. .. As it has done in the past, globalization is throwing up dilemmas that have no satisfactory solution. That does not mean they cannot be more or less intelligently managed, but what is needed is the opposite of the utopian imagination."

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 07:34:19 GMT

The torture stories aren't over: "The Schmidt report calls the treatment of [Gitmo] detainees "abusive and degrading" but also "humane." That's the Orwellian world George W. Bush has introduced us to. .. [Attorney Marty Lederman has written] 'More disturbing still is the Report's repeated assertions that the techniques in question ... are not only "humane," but also are authorized by Army Field Manual 34-52. Field Manual 34-52 has, since the 1960's, defined the interrogation techniques that are acceptable within the military even for POWs who are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. .. Accordingly, by virtue of the Schmidt Report itself, this is not simply about al-Qahtani and other high-level detainees, nor about what is permissible at Guantanamo.'

One great merit of the Schmidt report - which is otherwise riddled with worrying euphemisms, dismissal of troubling facts, exoneration of almost all commanders - is that we now know that almost every one of the Abu Ghraib techniques was practised and innovated at Guantanamo. These were not improvised out of nowhere.. The kind of techniques used in Abu Ghraib - sexual humiliation, hooding, use of dogs, tying prisoners up in "stress positions", mandatory nudity, humiliating prisoners for their religious faith, even the famous Lynndie England leash - were all developed at Guantanamo Bay under the strictest of supervision. What we were told were just frat-guy, crazy techniques on the night shift - had been deployed by the best trained, most tightly controlled, most professional interrogation center we have."

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 07:17:29 GMT

Rove's war: Why won't Judith Miller talk? "In the run-up to the war, Miller's articles on WMD were crucial in creating a political atmosphere favorable to the administration's case. But her articles were later revealed to be false, based on disinformation, and the Times published a long apology...

Bill Kovach believes that any pledge she may have made to a source should be invalid. Kovach is the former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. He describes the internal policy set within the Times on sources. "By the 1980s, we decided that we had to set some limits because reporters had been misled and the credibility of the news reports had been damaged by misleading sources. When I was chief of the bureau in Washington, we laid down a rule to the reporters that when they wanted to establish anonymity they had to lay out ground rules that if anything the source said was damaging, false or damaged the credibility of the newspaper we would identify them."

In the Plame matter, Kovach sees no obligation of the reporters to false sources. "If a man damages your credibility, why not lay the blame where it belongs? If Plame were an operative, she wouldn't have the authority to send someone. Whoever was leaking that information to Novak, Cooper or Judy Miller was doing it with malice aforethought, trying to set up a deceptive circumstance. That would invalidate any promise of confidentiality. You wouldn't protect a source for telling lies or using you to mislead your audience. That changes everything. Any reporter that puts themselves or a news organization in that position is making a big mistake." "

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 07:19:54 GMT

Why Do They Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq: "It is also interesting to note that none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. .. Even their calls for the withdrawal of the European troops from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces.

Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes. The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are." For a fuller treatment of the ideas and history behind this, see The New York Review of Books: The Truth About Jihad.

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 09:10:45 GMT

Confidential sources: "This episode is part and parcel of the debasement of the confidential source’s role in American journalism. ..

Many in the press are talking as though the Cooper-Miller mess destroys their ability to recruit and exploit confidential sources, but plainly they’re not talking about confidential sources the way we think about them in the investigative journalism biz. Investigative reporters strive never to hang a story directly on quotes or commentary from confidential sources; they use the sources to guide them to privileged material such as documents, in black and white. That protects the story, and in all but the rare case, it protects the source, too.

Washington confidentiality in the modern era is all about maintaining access, even if that access yields scarcely anything worth publishing. If you have a confidential chat with Karl Rove, and he leads you down the garden path, do you end up with anything worthwhile other than DC cocktail party chatter about your last conversation with Karl Rove? And should we be appalled and surprised that Rove used the occasion to mislead? To paraphrase George Orwell, you can’t blame Rove for taking such an opportunity to further his own interests, any more than you can blame a skunk for stinking."

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 11:52:01 GMT

Two Years Before 9/11, Bush was Already Talking About Attacking Iraq: "Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker." ..

"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader." "

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 17:44:17 GMT

Al-Qaeda's relevance in an age of reform: al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a video in mid-June, before the London attack. Here's how an al-Jazeera talk show covered it. "Rather than just air or report Zawahiri's remarks, the program presents short excerpts and then gives the guests a chance to comment and respond to each of Zawahiri's points in turn. .. [the] topic: is al-Qaeda relevant in the context of the current push for reform? "

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 17:35:46 GMT

Cole on Knowing his Own History; and Isaiah Berlin: I'm catching up on a few months of Juan Cole. Good note on the runup to Iraq: " Berlin made the key point that most ethical and social philosophers had assumed that a person could simultaneously pursue two virtues [but] in the real world, there are situations in which you can only have the one or the other. ..

Up until early March of 2003, I was not forced to choose between Justice and the Rule of Law because it appeared entirely plausible that the UNSC would pass a resolution authorizing the war, or that a majority, at least, would vote for it. It was during that period that I said I could not bring myself to protest the building war. It was because I knew Saddam's mass murders, and thought there was still a chance that he could be removed within the framework of international law. When the UNSC declined to do either, very late in the game, it became apparent that I could have either justice or the rule of law. At that point I chose the rule of law. I did not see the invasion, the war, or the subsequent occupation as legitimate.

Just because I chose the rule of law over justice, however, does not mean that justice as a consideration had evaporated. The US troops who gave their lives to depose Saddam and free Iraqis from his yoke were helping achieve justice, which any Kurd or Shiite in Iraq will tell you. I stand by that, and I assure every grieving parent who has lost a child in the Iraq war that it was a meaningful sacrifice, because the Baath system was monstrous. But this achievement was deeply flawed (and may yet be undone) because it was done illegally.

Bush's turn to illegal aggression contained the seeds of the failure of his Iraq policy. If he had remained within international law, he would have either had to give up the invasion or he would have gone in with the full support the international community, which would have given him the kind of troop strength and administrative expertise that might have made a success of it all.

The Neocons cannot for the most part imagine such a thing as a fraught internal debate over ethics on the part of the individual. This because they are mostly, quite frankly, sleazeballs.

Isaiah Berlin knew that we often cannot have it all. We have to choose among virtues. We have to decide which one trumps the other. These can be fraught decisions. And that is why I do not fault those who chose justice over the rule of law among the liberal hawks like Ignatieff and Friedman."

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 10:36:32 GMT

Trudy Rubin, Columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer: Image excerpts from "Willful Blindness: The Bush Administration and Iraq."

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 10:31:06 GMT

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism:It's the occupation, not the fundamentalism: Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win, The Logic of Suicide Terrorism: "Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. .. This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group .. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers. ..

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw. ..

I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990. [From 2003-5,] every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled. ..

Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition. What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.

That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger. ..

In the 1970s and the 1980s, the United States secured its interest in oil without stationing a single combat soldier on the Arabian Peninsula. Instead, we formed an alliance with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we can now do again. We relied on numerous aircraft carriers off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and naval air power now is more effective not less. We also built numerous military bases so that we could move large numbers of ground forces to the region quickly if a crisis emerged. .. That strategy called “offshore balancing,” worked splendidly against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and is again our best strategy to secure our interest in oil while preventing the rise of more suicide terrorists. ..

Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime. .. That doesn’t mean that the existing suicide terrorists will not want to keep going. .. There will be a tiny number of people who are still committed to the cause, but the real issue is not whether Osama bin Laden exists. It is whether anybody listens to him. That is what needs to come to an end for Americans to be safe from suicide terrorism. "

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 10:11:31 GMT

A Reality Check from Iraq: "Jonathan Morgenstein was a Marine Corps civil affairs officer in Ramadi, Iraq, and received a master's degree in international policy from Stanford University:

As an Iraq War veteran, I disagree with how President Bush has assessed the war and how we should be conducting it. The president has mischaracterized the debate as a simplistic black and white challenge: "Is the sacrifice worth it?" But this mischaracterization clouds the debate and avoids two essential questions: What are the real conditions on the ground? And what must be done to win this war?

Unfortunately, the president continues to obscure the truth of the current conditions in Iraq. My personal experiences in Iraq confirm statements made by numerous officers there, including General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command – that the insurgency shows no signs of weakening, and its numbers continue to grow. The Bush administration must first recognize this serious problem in order to rectify it. Denial is not the path to success.

As a Marine Corps civil affairs officer serving for seven months in Ramadi, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency, my job was to cultivate economic, governmental and civil society development. .. The gap between President Bush's rhetoric and the reality that I saw on the ground is enormous. ,,

Iraqi troops will not be able to provide security for a long time, despite President Bush's assertions. President Bush has argued that the Iraqi Security Forces will soon be capable of providing security for Iraq. However, his assertion that "Iraq has more than 160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions," is misleading. President Bush's 160,000 includes Iraqi forces that: 1) have no uniforms or weapons; 2) don't show up for work regularly; 3) have no more than three weeks of training; and 4) are actually working for or with the insurgents.

Most Americans in Iraq have had personal experience with one or more of these problems. In fact, one of my unit's convoys was attacked with machine gun fire from an Iraqi police station. One Iraqi National Guard colonel told me personally that he works well with the insurgents. ..

My experiences in Ramadi tell me that we need to find ways to dramatically increase the boots on the ground—whether American or troops from other countries—to increase security. Without basic law and order, Iraq will see no progress. Nevertheless, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have consistently resisted calls for increasing troop levels. In his speech President Bush said that "our commanders tell [him] they have the number of troops they need." Virtually every Marine and soldier I met in Iraq complained that more troops were needed to win. Until President Bush speaks candidly regarding Iraq and admits we have made mistakes, we cannot solve the problem"

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 04:38:15 GMT

How To Change Ugly Regimes: The case for 'conditional engagement': The US "tried regime change with Iran and conditional engagement with Libya. .. For the average person in Libya or Vietnam, American policy has improved his or her life and life chances. For the average person in Iran or Cuba, U.S. policy has produced decades of isolation and economic hardship. Don't get me wrong. I think the regimes in Tehran and Havana are ugly and deserve to pass into the night. But do our policies actually make that more likely? ..

Who would have predicted that Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan would see so much change in the past year and a half? But these examples only prove my point. The United States had no "regime change" policy toward any of these countries, and it had relations with all of them. In fact, these relationships helped push the regimes to change and emboldened civil-society groups. ..

Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with what was arguably the most brutal regime in the world at the time. And as a consequence of that opening, China today is far more free—economically and socially—than it has ever been. If we were trying to help the Chinese people, would isolation have been a better policy? ,,

it feels morally righteous and satisfying to "do something" about cruel regimes. But in doing what we so often do, we cut these countries off from the most powerful agents of change in the modern world—commerce, contact, information. To change a regime, short of waging war, you have to shift the balance of power between the state and society. Society needs to be empowered. .. [By] piling on sanctions and ensuring that a country is isolated, Washington only ensures that the state becomes ever more powerful and society remains weak and dysfunctional. In addition, the government benefits from nationalist sentiment as it stands up to the global superpower. Think of Iraq before the war, which is a rare case where multilateral sanctions were enforced. As we are discovering now, the sanctions destroyed Iraq's middle class, its private sector and its independent institutions, but they allowed Saddam to keep control. When the regime was changed by war, it turned out that nation-building was vastly more difficult because the underpinnings of civil society had been devastated. ..

In a careful study, the Institute for International Economics has estimated that U.S. sanctions on 26 countries, accounting for more than half the world's population, cost America between $15 billion and $19 billion in lost exports annually and have worked less than 13 percent of the time ..

regime change has become a substitute for an actual policy toward countries like North Korea and Iran, with which we have serious security problems. Rather than tackling the issue of North Korean nukes, we're waiting for the country to collapse. We might be waiting awhile." Notable that the only 'condition' in conditional engagement is a non-confrontational security posture. Economic and political liberalization are the result, not the precondition, for engagement.

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 20:21:06 GMT

Schwarzenegger unveiling global warming plan at U.N. conference: A clear break from national Republicans. ""Today, California will be a leader in the fight against global warming," Schwarzenegger told a United Nations conference on the environment Wednesday. "I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat and we know the time for action is now." .. Schwarzenegger's plan, released at the opening of the U.N. World Environmental Day Conference, calls for reducing the state's emissions of greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050." Key passage: " “I challenge everyone to match our commitment,” he said. In the past, he added, the harmful impacts on the atmosphere of burning of fossil fuels were unknown. But now there’s no excuse not to take action. "That was our mistake," he said. "But now we do know better. And if we don't do better, that will be our injustice.""

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 06:36:21 GMT

Uncle Sam: Jekyll or Hyde? "I think that the Bush administration has a Jekyll-and-Hyde problem—a contradictory attitude toward the war on terror. On the one hand it has wholeheartedly embraced the view that America must change its image in the Muslim world. It wants to stop being seen as the supporter of Muslim tyrants and instead become the champion of Muslim freedoms. President Bush and his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, are transforming American policy in this realm, and while some of the implementation has been spotty, the general thrust is clear and laudable. ..

But while Dr. Jekyll makes speeches by day on Arab liberty, some nights he turns into Mr. Hyde. There is within the Bush administration another impulse, a warrior ethos that believes in beating up bad guys without much regard for such niceties as international law. Excessive concern for such matters would be a sign of weakness, the kind of thing liberals do. Men like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld see themselves above all else as tough guys. ..

Tough tactics in a darkened room in Abu Ghraib are not going to stay dark in a world of tiny cameras and recorders. And it's not just technology that's different, it's human attitudes. Today, when you release prisoners from Guantanamo, they don't return quietly to their villages in Waziristan. They hire lawyers, talk to human-rights organizations and organize public protests. And in a war for hearts and minds, the benefits of the intelligence gained might well be outweighed by the cost to America's image. Dr. Jekyll needs to explain this to Mr. Cheney, I mean Mr. Hyde. .. "

Thu, 26 May 2005 08:04:19 GMT

Firm to use PR methods on online media and the blogosphere: I've been wondering when blogs and new media would attract PR professionals and political money. In this case, it's someone from Fox and Cato. "Next Generation Advertising has opened its doors in D.C. to produce online "virtual" public policy campaigns. Founder Richard Pollock says the goal is to use what is known as "rich media," video/flash, audio and animation for "entertaining, compelling and interactive" campaigns that can be posted on a variety of online sites. Pollock says Next Generation will also turn to influential Web-log sites run by bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers. Broadband now permits downloadable video to move around the Internet in a matter of days. In an online campaign, Pollock says, policy advocates are free of the time limitations of 30- to 60-second TV spots and can reach out to specific audiences by advertising precisely where they visit.

Pollock is a former Washington producer for ABC's Good Morning America and in 1993 won a daytime Emmy. He also was a senior producer for Fox News Sunday. Before founding Next Generation, Pollock was executive vice president of Shandwick Public Affairs and vice president of communications for the Cato Institute." [Via John Furrier]

Tue, 24 May 2005 07:35:26 GMT

Fundable: A web site for pooling money in small groups. "Get it to happen or get your money back." Could be great for non-profits, open-source coders or freelancers wanting to get paid for making a contribution, fans raising money to fund a concert, bulk buying, school projects, and more. (How about a private lottery: if we all chip in, one of us gets to go somewhere amazing..) [From Hugh Pyle]

Fri, 20 May 2005 08:09:37 GMT

China spending estimate reduced: Reminds me of how DoD estimates of the Soviet military were overstated. "The RAND Corporation, a research group that studies many issues for the Pentagon, estimated China's military spending totaled $31 billion to $38 billion in 2003, which it said was the most recent year for which full data was available. By contrast, the Defense Department has put the 2003 figure as high as $65 billion, 71 percent greater than the high end of RAND's estimate..

RAND estimated China's defense spending at 2.3 percent to 2.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2003. Using what it called newly available Chinese-language primary sources, it said this was 1.4 to 1.7 times the official Chinese number. By comparison, U.S. defense spending was 3.8 percent of GDP in 2003, or about $417.5 billion. "

Wed, 18 May 2005 08:49:41 GMT

Retirement at 70: Calculations of effect of gradual increases in retirement age for social security and medicare. " Under present law, it reaches 67 in 2027. That's too slow. Increasing it gradually to 70 by 2030 would require annual increases of about two months a year." Adjusting early retirement from 62 to 66, and slight increases in progressivity of benefits, saves 3.5% of GDP by 2030.

Sat, 14 May 2005 08:14:08 GMT

Gallup: 50% of Americans Now Say Bush Deliberately Misled Them on WMDs: "Half of all Americans, exactly 50%, now say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Gallup Organization reported this morning.

"This is the highest percentage that Gallup has found on this measure since the question was first asked in late May 2003," the pollsters observed. "At that time, 31% said the administration deliberately misled Americans. This sentiment has gradually increased over time, to 39% in July 2003, 43% in January/February 2004, and 47% in October 2004."

Also, according to the latest poll, more than half of Americans, 54%, disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, while 43% approve. In early February, Americans were more evenly divided on the way Bush was handling the situation in Iraq, with 50% approving and 48% disapproving. "

Sat, 14 May 2005 07:59:43 GMT

Chalabi returns as Deputy PM: "King Abdullah of Jordan has agreed to pardon Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi political leader, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for fraud after his bank collapsed with $300m (£160m) in missing deposits in 1989. Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, asked the king to resolve the differences between Jordan and Mr Chalabi, now Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq,.. Again Mr Chalabi has escaped not only political annihilation, but has emerged from a crisis with his power enhanced."

Tue, 10 May 2005 16:33:17 GMT

Pakistan agrees jet deal with Chinese: "Pakistan and China have agreed to start joint production of a new fighter aircraft intended as a replacement for the ageing French and Chinese aircraft used by Pakistan's air force, a senior Pakistani air force officer said yesterday.

The agreement comes only two months after the US offered to sell F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan, reversing sanctions applied almost 15 years ago over Islamabad's nuclear weapons programme. The move also comes as the US voices concern about the rise of the Chinese military. .. Tom Donnelly, defence analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the new JF-17 would enhance China's ability to intimidate Taiwan and mount an air campaign following a missile attack on the island. ..

The first four of the JF-17 "Thunder" aircraft would be delivered to Pakistan next year for trial flights, while the supply of 150 aircraft would begin in 2007." Total 150 are planned for Pakistan, 250 for China, with half produced in each country.

Mon, 09 May 2005 17:20:51 GMT

What the American Civil War can inform us about Iraq: An American Army conference draws parallels: "The Civil War, like the invasion of Iraq, was a war of transformation where the victors hoped to reshape the political culture of the vanquished. But as McPherson tells the story, reconstruction posed severe and unexpected tests: The occupying Union army was harassed by an insurgency that fused die-hard remnants of the old plantation power structure with irregular guerrillas. The Union was as unprepared for this struggle as was the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2003. The army of occupation was too small, and its local allies were often corrupt and disorganized.

Reconstruction suffered partly because of a mismatch between a transformational strategy and haphazard tactics. Northern radicals like Representative Thaddeus Stevens wanted to break the old slaveholding aristocracy and remake the South into a version of New England, with former slaves and poor whites dividing up the plantations. But only weeks after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson was moving to protect the privileges of the old regime. ..

For a time, it still seemed that reconstruction might work. "In 1870, things looked pretty good - if not rosy, at least optimistic," says McPherson, who won a Pulitzer for his 1988 narrative, "Battle Cry of Freedom." A black man was serving in the U.S. Senate and Northerners were investing in what they believed would be a new South. But the insurgency was potent and took more than 1,000 lives. Along with the Ku Klux Klan, there were underground groups such as "The White Brotherhood" and "The Knights of the White Camellia," determined to preserve the old regime's power. White insurgents staged bloody riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The rebels also drew support from the remnants of irregular Confederate units such as Quantrill's Raiders, which spawned the outlaws Frank and Jesse James. "It was a matrix of lawlessness," says Oregon law professor Garrett Epps, who chronicles the period in a forthcoming book, "Second Founding."

The poison that destroyed Reconstruction was racial hatred. The white elite managed to convince poor whites that newly freed blacks were their enemies, rather than potential allies. There's an obvious analogy to the Sunni-Shiite divide that has poisoned postwar Iraq. In the South, the die-hard whites began to believe that if they held tough, the North would eventually abandon the campaign to create a new, multiracial South. And it turned out they were right. By 1877, says McPherson, the North essentially gave up. ..

What lessons does this dismal history convey for American forces in Iraq? First, what you do immediately after the end of hostilities is crucial, and mistakes made then may be impossible to undo. Don't attempt a wholesale transformation of another society unless you have the troops and political will to impose it. Above all, don't let racial or religious hatred destroy democratic political institutions as in the post-bellum South."

Sun, 08 May 2005 07:04:18 GMT

The Perfect Storm to Drown the Economy: Speculation on how an economic crisis might unfold. ""There's a pattern that is familiar from so many other countries that have gotten into debt problems," said Jeffrey A. Frankel, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "A simultaneous rise in interest rates, fall in securities prices and depreciation of the currency."

Of course, economists, always armed with bandoliers of caveats, are quick to warn that the economy is relatively healthy. .. That said, how might a perfect storm be created? It would likely gather overseas. .. If the Bank of China, which has been accumulating dollars at the rate of $200 billion a year, decides to cut back on new purchases, either to diversify or to let its currency appreciate, the United States would quickly have to offer sharply higher interest rates to retain existing investors and entice new ones. Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, estimates that if China cut its rate of accumulation by half, long-term interest rates in the United States could rise by 200 basis points over a few months and the value of the dollar would fall.

Such a rising tide - the yield on the 10-year bond shooting from 4.25 to 6.25, the average 30-year mortgage rising from 6 percent to 8 percent - would mean instantly higher borrowing costs for the government, businesses and consumers. It would drench Wall Street, soaking the stocks of giant interest-rate-sensitive blue chips like Citigroup and making life difficult for speculative, debt-ridden companies. .. "The result would not be a full-blown financial crisis most likely, but it would still be a major recession," said Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics and political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

What's more, a recovery would be comparatively slow in coming. When the global economy came to a screeching, synchronous halt in 2001, the United States led much of the world back to growth because the federal government went on a stimulus binge for several years: Congress significantly increased government spending while cutting taxes, and the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to historic lows, and held them there. But in the perfect economic storm, none of these three powerful levers would be readily available. Today's deep budget deficits make both significant tax cuts and spending increases unlikely. And rising interest rates would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Federal Reserve to reduce the cost of borrowing. ..

[But,] adds Jeffrey Frankel, "some of us have been warning of this hard-landing scenario for more than 20 years.""

Sun, 08 May 2005 06:51:01 GMT

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of 'mistaken identity' - Sunday Times: "THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation. .. the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme. Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.

“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.” .. Although British intelligence has evidence of telephone calls between al-Libbi and operatives in the UK, he is not believed to be Al-Qaeda’s commander of operations in Europe, as reported.

The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 2003. Last year he was named Pakistan’s most wanted man with a $350,000 (£185,000) price on his head. .. A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.” ..

Some believe al-Libbi’s significance has been cynically hyped by two countries that want to distract attention from their lack of progress in capturing Bin Laden, who has now been on the run for almost four years. Even a senior FBI official admitted that al-Libbi’s “influence and position have been overstated”.

Thu, 05 May 2005 16:40:30 GMT

The Christian Complex: Factoid from George Will: "According to the American Religious Identification Survey, Americans who answer "none" when asked to identify their religion numbered 29.4 million in 2001, more than double the 14.3 million in 1990. "

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:23:18 GMT

FT/James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity: Well written commentary on the "evidence-free zone" in which IP policy is made, both in the US and Europe. "If we don’t look at the evidence and we ignore the role of the public domain in fostering innovation, how can we possibly hope to make good policy?" Links to other useful articles.

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:19:21 GMT

The GoogleSmear: Juan Cole on how others use Google News and the blogosphere to spread falsehoods and smear (or at least distract) opponents.

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 06:49:48 GMT

Humanitarian worker in Iraq says things have gotten worse: "This week, Rick McDowell of the American Friends Service Committee visited the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram to talk about his time in Iraq. McDowell and his wife, Mary Trotochaud, were part of an assessment team for a consortium of faith-based humanitarian agencies. .. McDowell's job had been to assess the conditions in Iraq and see how humanitarian resources were being used, as well as to work with new Iraqi non-governmental organizations and help with larger projects such as water sanitation.

What he saw wasn't good. "In the past two years, rather than seeing an improvement in services, (Iraqis are) seeing a continual decline in those services," McDowell said. That's gone hand in hand with a decline in security. ..

On one hand, people were thrilled that Saddam's regime was overthrown. On the other hand, McDowell said, "I don't know anybody that would tell you conditions are better. They are worse. Obviously, there were problems under the regime. But they could walk the streets. Their kids could go to school. They felt safe - as long as they didn't engage in politics." ..

[Iraqi security forces must be built up.] The other thing that should happen, he said, is the United States should clearly announce its intention to leave. McDowell was in Maine to request that Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe include an amendment to the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill that states the United States' intent to pull both its troops and its bases out of Iraq. "The reality is there will always be insurgents in Iraq as long as we have bases there," McDowell said. He's not asking to include a timeline in the statement - just to state intent. The president has already said America plans to withdraw troops, but McDowell said it's worth making the proclamation as well.

"That creates space, not only in Iraq, but in the region, and I think in the world," McDowell said. "It's saying that we do not have imperial designs.""

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 06:00:25 GMT

Neoconning the Media: A Very Short History of Neoconservatism: Good summary by Eric Alterman. After reviewing the think tanks and media outlets, he concludes: "Despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union had demonstrated just how fundamentally wrong had been their analysis of the relative power of both superpowers for most of their existence -- they, nevertheless, were the ones with actionable ideas lying around when it came time to find an appropriately macho-tinged response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. ..

They lost Communism but found terrorism and embraced the unashamed promotion of global empire. .. Their war on Iraq has proven a catastrophe by almost any available measure but they are already planning another adventure in Iran. Every few years, we read of some set of events that imply the "end of Neoconservatism." Don't believe the hype. It would be hard to imagine a more profound rebuke to their world view than the various events that have followed in the wake of the Iraqi invasion.

The United States is now less safe, poorer, more hated and more constrained in its ability to fight terrorism than it was before the tragic loss of blood and treasure the war has demanded. And yet the Neocons have admitted almost no mistakes and continue to be rewarded with plum posts in the Bush administration. What doesn't kill them just makes them stronger. In their example lies many lessons for liberals, alas."

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 07:22:45 GMT

EU vs. USA: Thorough report from Sweden comparing the economies, with interesting results. "IF THE EU WERE A PART of the United States of America, would it belong to the richest or the poorest group of states? .. France, Italy and Germany have less per capita GDP than all but five of the states of the USA .. [Sweden], if it were a part of the USA, would rank as one of the very poorest states in that Union.. the American economy has been growing faster than the economies of many European countries in recent decades, not least those of countries like France, Germany and Sweden... This puts Europeans at a level of prosperity on par with states such as Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. Only the miniscule country of Luxembourg has higher per capita GDP than the average state in the USA [and that is attributed to an influx of foreign capital]..

Per capita private consumption is far higher in the USA than in most European countries. In the USA the average person spends about $9,700 more on consumption annually, a difference of 77 per cent. The average American,
in other words, spends nearly twice as much (77 per cent more) on consumption as the average EU citizen. This is due to a higher level of GDP but also to taxation policy. Allowance for tax differences would reduce these big differences somewhat, but American consumption would still far outweigh its European counterpart."

Additional info found in an NYT article that constrasts these numbers with the common (faulty) perception of Scandinavian wealth. The biggest factor was the growth rates in the 1990s, with the US adding 2% more GDP every year than the EU.

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:57:50 GMT

Nuclear Plants Are Still Vulnerable, Panel Says: "Three and a half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government has failed to address the risk that a passenger plane flying at high speed could be deliberately crashed into a commercial nuclear plant, setting off fires and dispersing large amounts of radiation, a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded. .. the risk of major attacks could be sufficiently addressed by changing how spent fuel is stored in pools and by installing water sprays to control fires, said the academy's Kevin Crowley, the study coordinator. ..

"We do believe that the possibility of a successful attack using commercial aircraft is very small," [NRC spokesman Scott Burnell] said. It is impractical to ask commercial plants to defend against such attacks, Burnell concluded." How much does one 911 cost? As with chemical plants, this administration considers it "impractical" to impose any costs on the private sector, so nothing will be done.

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 02:14:08 GMT

It's a Flat World, After All: Tom Friedman, in a longer treatment of his awakening to globalization. Nice to see him realize the world does not revolve around the middle east. Key point: "we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. [Now] you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids. "

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 17:54:52 GMT

On Intelligence Excerpt - Prologue: From Jeff Hawkin's recent book. Nice intro.

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:39:23 GMT

Patriot Act Changes to Be Proposed: "In addition to the provision on business records, critics are likely to focus on measures that loosened standards for secret intelligence warrants and on a permanent provision that allows delayed notification of searches -- known by critics as "sneak-and-peek warrants." In the latter case, the Justice Department released statistics yesterday showing that investigators have used such warrants 155 times since October 2001. ..

Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances [is] an ad hoc alliance that includes groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union. The group was formed last month in an effort to seek changes in the Patriot Act."

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:33:09 GMT

Sneaking and peeking: FBI admits secret searches of Mayfield's home: "In a recent letter to Mayfield's attorneys, the Justice Department admitted that FBI agents conducted secret searches of Mayfield's house under a particularly Orwellian provision of the Patriot Act. .. Brandon Mayfield is the Portland attorney whose life became a screeching nightmare last year after he was jailed in connection with train bombings in Spain. He was released two weeks later after the FBI admitted that it had wrongly accused Mayfield of complicity. ..

During those searches, agents took 10 DNA samples preserved on cotton swabs and removed six cigarette butts for DNA analysis. They took 335 digital photographs of Mayfield's personal effects, his house and property. They inventoried his safe-deposit box. They seized a book that chronicled the history of al-Qaeda, two guns and material that agents say related "to U.S. weapons systems" but that Mayfield's attorneys say was a U.S. Army manual from Mayfield's time in the military. They seized three computer hard drives. They wiretapped his home.

If the Justice Department could so brazenly violate Mayfield's Fourth Amendment right to protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures," it can do the same to other citizens under the Patriot Act. In fact, it probably already has. ..

Mayfield's name was among 20 produced by a computerized fingerprint match, and he says he was singled out because he is a Muslim. .. The FBI did all this under the Patriot Act's "sneak and peek" provision. It allows federal investigators to search suspects' homes and businesses without informing them that the searches have taken place. It's one of several deeply flawed provisions of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of this year and that Congress should eliminate. "

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 15:43:27 GMT

China, Iran Cruise Missile Sales Confirmed: "Smugglers in Ukraine shipped 18 cruise missiles, each capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, to Iran and China at the beginning of the decade, Ukrainian prosecutors said Friday. The apparent sale to Iran of 12 of the Soviet-era Kh-55 cruise missiles, which have a range of 1,860 miles, is likely to add to concern in Washington about alleged efforts by Iran to develop nuclear weapons. .. public confirmation by the new administration of President Viktor Yushchenko came Friday.

Each missile is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead with a 200-kiloton yield at altitudes too low to be detected by radar, and the sales have been portrayed as a significant leak of Soviet-era weapons technology. .. Omelchenko said missiles were shipped to China in 2000 and Iran in 2001. If the missiles were made operational, they could strike Israel if launched from Iran and Japan if fired from China or its neighbor, North Korea. The Japanese government reportedly is worried that the six missiles allegedly shipped to China could have ended up in North Korea, which claims to possess nuclear weapons. ..

The [defendant's] attorney said the missiles sent to Iran and China were manufactured in 1987, had a service life of eight years, had been stored since 1992 in a way that did not meet standards, lacked parts and were missing the technical documents needed to use them, Itar-Tass reported."

The state prosecutor says it was a criminal group, but a legislator mainatins that the Ukrspetsexport, the state-owned arms sale monopoly was involved.

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:25:29 GMT

Which War Is This Anyway? "research for this piece by the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law suggests, just about all the major captures of significant al-Qaeda figures (or figures claimed to be significant) have been made not by the American military (a blunt instrument indeed when it came to the capture of men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or countless others) but by law enforcement. Here is a listing of a number of the alleged terrorist figures, large and small, who were captured in the post-9/11 years (arranged by name, place and time of apprehension, whom apprehended by [LA stands for "Local Authorities"], and current custody if known): .. [40 people listed] As you'll note, with few exceptions, these men were taken by "local authorities." " I wonder how many have been killed by the military; at least a few in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 06:01:23 GMT

Group Leaves Social Security Overhaul Bloc: Cracks in the GOP. "Signaling more troubles ahead for President Bush's campaign to overhaul Social Security, a group representing the nation's biggest financial companies said Monday that it had decided not to renew its membership in a business coalition raising millions of dollars to back the effort.

The Financial Services Forum, which represents chief executives from such corporate heavyweights as American Express, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, was a co-founder of the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security, or Compass. But it left the coalition last month after its members failed to agree on Bush's plan to let workers divert some of their payroll tax into individual investment accounts...

[It was] the latest indication of the conflicting pressures facing corporate executives — on one side, a White House eager for their backing on Bush's top domestic priority and on the other, corporate shareholders wary of endangering profits by entering a politically charged battle that could alienate customers and some investors. Trepeta said the forum had helped to create Compass to push for Social Security restructuring in general, and it was not prepared to become embroiled in a highly partisan war over private investment accounts...

The forum's shift follows the decision by two securities firms — Edward Jones and Waddell & Reed — to drop out of a related lobbying group set up to promote private accounts on Capitol Hill, the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security. ..

Financial services companies have come under particular pressure from opponents of private accounts, especially the AFL-CIO. These critics charge that the companies stand to benefit from Bush's plan to let workers divert taxes into stocks and bonds that the companies would manage. The AFL-CIO wrote to Lazio on Monday demanding to know where his group's members stood on private accounts and calling on the forum to "disavow" its support for the accounts. Because labor unions control large amounts of money for investment, through pension and mutual funds and as institutional shareholders, they have strong leverage with brokerage and financial services firms. The AFL-CIO has organized demonstrations against some firms; more are planned this month against Charles Schwab and Wachovia. Schwab officials have said they remain neutral on private accounts. ..

The forum represents 20 large firms and is the first known defection from Compass, which is raising an estimated $20 million to promote private accounts as part of a campaign coordinated with the White House and the Republican National Committee.

William Patterson, an AFL-CIO official who has helped organize the federation's efforts to pressure corporations into withdrawing from the White House-backed coalitions, said Monday that he "applauded" the forum's decision. He said the group's move might heighten pressure on other financial services groups, such as the Securities Industry Assn., whose membership list overlaps that of the forum, to follow suit. "The position that the industry associations have taken was untenable — that you can be in an advocacy position while your members are telling the investing public that they're neutral or not taking a position," said Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's investment office. "We could not find a single firm that would stand by the Compass position." "

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:54:11 GMT

Cheney, the Energy Task Force, and Iraq: Why was (and is) it important to the administration to keep the work of the energy task force secret? "For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind’s recent book “The Price of Loyalty,” former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney’s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney’s Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially “huge.” He said, “People think Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues,” referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush’s energy policy. “But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.”" The case is still in the courts, sent back to the appellate court by the Supreme Court in June 2004. Thanks to Salon's recent scandal sheet.

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:28:20 GMT

Listen to the Admiral: "Bobby" Inman on intelligence and the Bush crowd. A good short read. "Slate: Does this business—with Casey and George Bush Sr.—go back to when Donald Rumsfeld suggested making George Bush the head of the CIA in 1975?

Inman: The standard rumor at the time was that Rumsfeld, as chief of staff, had persuaded President Ford to appoint George H.W. Bush as director of Central Intelligence, assuming that that got rid of a potential competitor for the presidency.

Slate: Donald Rumsfeld had his eye on the presidency?

Inman: Oh, yes. Yes. In '75. … He was looking forward. You know, Ford was going to run in '76, so Rumsfeld had his eye on '80. But it was a clever job of, you know, sending Bush out there—"He's buried. He'll never come back to be a presidential candidate."

Slate: Some people think he was given the directorship of the CIA because he had a CIA background and they mention that his father, Prescott Bush, was a member of the OSS. …

Inman: No, no, no. None of that's valid.

Slate: That's not true? It was really political considerations?

Inman: Absolutely. ..

Slate: What do you make of the pardons that George Bush Sr. gave to many of the people involved with the Iran-Contra situation?

Inman: Loyalty. They [the Bush family] give loyalty and they prize loyalty. I can remember—I don't want to identify the individual—but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.

Slate: Interesting that Rumsfeld's disloyalty to Bush Sr. would be rewarded by Bush Jr.

Inman: Certainly Rumsfeld didn't get the job in Defense through personal loyalty to Bush; he got it because Cheney was his sponsor...

Slate: .. Paul Wolfowitz; we saw a lot of him and the neocons in the Iraq war run-up. They have virtually disappeared. Why is that?

Inman: They don't want to take the blame. … [T]hey were willing to take credit for things earlier; they don't want to take blame.

Slate: Who is going to take the blame?

Inman: I think we'd better stop there."

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 01:00:45 GMT

Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions: We may learn more about CIA kidnappings from European magistrates and media. "three official investigations that have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe. Although the CIA usually carries out the operations with the help or blessing of friendly local intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are examining whether U.S. agents may have broken local laws by detaining terrorist suspects on European soil and subjecting them to abuse or maltreatment. "

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:59:01 GMT

The Sharecropper Society: Excerpts from Berkshire Hathaway's annual report. "Berkshire owned about $21.4 billion of foreign exchange contracts at year end [i.e. 2004], spread among 12 currencies. As I mentioned last year, holdings of this kind are a decided change for us. .. The decline in [the dollar's] value has already been substantial, but is nevertheless likely to continue. ..

other countries and their citizens now own a net of about $3 trillion of the U.S. A decade ago their net ownership was negligible .. Should we continue to run current account deficits comparable to those now prevailing, the net ownership of the U.S. by other countries and their citizens a decade from now will amount to roughly $11 trillion. And, if foreign investors were to earn only 5% on that net holding, we would need to send a net of $.55 trillion of goods and services abroad every year merely to service the U.S. investments then held by foreigners. At that date, a decade out, our GDP would probably total about $18 trillion [sot the US] would then be delivering 3% of its annual output to the rest of the world simply as tribute for the overindulgences of the past. .. A country that is now aspiring to an “Ownership Society” will not find happiness in -– and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis -– a “Sharecropper’s Society.” "

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 20:45:30 GMT

frontline: high stakes in cyberspace: Paul Saffo in 1995 on PBS: Fun to read the old stuff. Paul Saffo is remarkably on-target, 10 years later. This article mentions "macro-myopia: A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short term impact of this stuff will be less than the hype would suggest but the long term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today." I've since encoutered Gartner's Hype Cycle, which they say they started to use also in 1995, with a graphic version of this insight.

I found this when looking for a reference to an aphorism that I think comes from Saffo. The aphorism: Over two years, things change much less than we think they will; but over ten years, they change more than we imagine.

It makes me wonder about the timeframe in between, say 5 to 7 years in the future, when major impacts will be felt from things we know are changing now, despite hype (digital sensors and surveillance) and disillusion (wind and solar power).

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 19:23:26 GMT

How America Became the World's Dispensable Nation: "A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US? they asked. Today the evidence of foreign cooperation to reduce American pri macy is everywhere - from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence. [examples in the article]

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas - far from it. And the other great powers, with the exception of the UK, are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt at hegemony in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside the US. The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration.. In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. But today, most international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation. In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the US: "We are the indispensable nation." By backfiring, the unilateralism of Mr Bush has proved her wrong. The US, it turns out, is a dispensable nation. Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are quietly taking measures whose effect, if not sole purpose, will be to cut America down to size."

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 01:23:48 GMT

Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Bloggers 02/16/05. Hilarious.

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 08:27:33 GMT

Juan Cole, spot on: "The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society"

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 07:08:36 GMT

Under-reporting: How the DoD undercounts Iraq casualties, by their own admission by a factor of over 2, by other's estimates possibly 3-4. "If an actual journalist, someone with resources, balls and determination, filed the right FOIA requests, we might begin to get some numbers we can trust." More technical details at globalsecurity.org.

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 06:41:00 GMT

Juan Cole doubts Iraq ballot fraud: "Al-Hayat also today repeats the allegation that the US or the electoral commission somehow cheated the United Iraqi Alliance of an absolute majority in parliament. (Note that this argument completely contradicts the interview they did, which speaks of US helplessness before the results.) The argument that the Iraqi elections were fixed is, however, implausible. It is sometimes alleged that the Shiites should have done better than they did, given the Sunni Arab absence. But when the smoke cleared, the UIA did have a majority in parliament, so the allegation makes no sense.. Precisely because the United Iraqi Alliance has ended up with 51 percent of the seats, which is enough to confirm the new government once a cabinet is selected, and since with the small Shiite parties it has 54 percent, either the US did not intervene in the ballot counting or it was completely incompetent in doing so. Personally, I don't think the US was in a position to intervene. Grand Ayatollah Sistani would not have put up with it, and the Americans knew it."

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 05:49:00 GMT

Daschle, Thune and the Blog-Storming of South Dakota: "The blogging efforts on behalf of Thune's Senate campaign didn't cause greater civic participation or bring in piles of small donations. Instead nine bloggers -- two of whom were paid $35,000 by Thune's campaign -- formed an alliance that constantly attacked the election coverage of South Dakota's principal newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. More specifically, their postings were not primarily aimed at dissuading the general public from trusting the Argus' coverage. Rather, the work of these bloggers was focused on getting into the heads of the three journalists at the Argus who were primarily responsible for covering the Daschle/Thune race: chief political reporter David Kranz, state editor Patrick Lalley, and executive editor Randell Beck.

Led by law student Jason van Beek and University of South Dakota history professor Jon Lauck, the Thune bloggers tormented and rattled the Argus staff for the duration of the 2004 election, clearly influencing the Argus' coverage. They also appear to have been a highly efficient vehicle for injecting classic no-fingerprints-attached opposition research on Daschle -- most of it tidbits that perhaps might never have made it into the old print media -- directly into the political bloodstream of South Dakota. What they did may turn out to be a "dark side of politics" model for campaign-blogger relations in 2005-06 -- made all the more telling by the fact that the Thune bloggers relied heavily on now-discredited Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of Talon News for many of their stories. "

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 02:01:09 GMT

Scott Ritter's latest: "On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. -- Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq." Will be interesting to see if these play out as accurately as his pre-war statements about WMD in Iraq.

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 23:58:17 GMT

Iraq's neighborhood councils are vanishing: "The fate of the councils provides grim evidence of how difficult it is for democracy to take root in Iraq. Hundreds of neighborhood councils, now a dead letter as the elite politicians who won seats in Iraq's national election squabble over the spoils, were set up across Iraq in 2003 by the US military and the Research Triangle Institute, based near Raleigh, N.C., was given a contract with up to $460 million to build local governance. The idea was to prime the pump of citizen participation and create a new culture that would make democracy work for citizens in a tangible way. But nearly two years later, the money and effort has yielded few visible gains.

Iraq's diverse and decentralized insurgency has turned its focus from US forces toward the easy targets provided by Iraq's front-line politicians, police officers, and new soldiers. Hundreds of low-level councilors have been killed, scaring local councils out of existence in at least a dozen of Iraqi towns. An official at the Research Triangle Institute says that councils still exist and are active in safer regions of Iraq, while others in the areas where insurgents have been most active may exist in name only."

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:02:29 GMT

The Intimate Planet: Skype brings live conversations with strangers from around the world to John Perry Barlow. He gets calls from a Vietnamese and a Chinese student practicing English, an Australian joking around; unmediated, no government minders, no commercial message (at least for now). The free arrival of random voices, like meeting strangers on a train, carries a shock. Like the first exposures to email and the web, the world comes even closer.

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:24:10 GMT

'My way' has a history: Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recalls German reunification and other cases where US policy pursued "maximalist" goals. David Brooks calls it a "soft-power gift [of] America [to] tendency to imagine new worlds," and sees recent democratic action in the mid-East as a current example. But Sestanovich puts in more power-politics terms. Referring to Rice's memoirs of the Bush 41 years, Rice "considered single-mindedness as the key to diplomatic success: a government that "knows what it wants" can usually get it. ..

Washington favored unification and wanted to achieve it as quickly as possible. In particular, American officials hoped for the rapid dismantlement of the East German state - a prospect America's allies viewed with horror. .. In the end, Bush and his advisers made no real adjustments to conciliate worried allies. ..

The Bush administration believed what most recent administrations have believed: America's allies were shortsighted and confused, and not tough-minded enough to achieve lasting success on a large scale. This was President Ronald Reagan's view when he scrapped détente. It was President Bill Clinton's view when he abandoned the policy of "containing" genocide in the Balkans. And it was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's view when she explained what she meant in calling the United States an "indispensable" nation: "We see further than other countries into the future. "

Many Europeans might describe such ideas as arrogant or pernicious. But American maximalism needs to be understood for at least two reasons.

First, it is America's tradition. Even the first Bush administration, for all its reputed pragmatism, reached for big solutions that cut against the grain of events. When it acted more cautiously - like the "Chicken Kiev" speech warning Ukrainians not to seek independence and the muddled end of the Gulf war - the results were less favorable. Rice and her colleagues, who learned maximalism early, may need a new approach, but they won't find it in a mythical past of multilateral consensus-building.

More important, over the past-quarter century, maximalism has worked: One of its clearest results is the post-cold-war emergence of a stable and unified Europe. Iraq may illustrate the hazards of a maximalist approach. But anyone who wants to frame an alternative, not least the allied leaders whom Rice will meet this week, must begin by reckoning with this record of success."

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:08:30 GMT

China's Quiet Rise Casts Wide Shadow: "China has emerged as an active and decisive leader in East Asia, transforming economic and diplomatic relationships across an area long dominated by the United States. The shift in status, increasingly clear over the past year, has changed the way Chinese officials view their country's international role as well as the way other Asians look to Beijing for cues. In many ways, China has started to act like a traditional big power, tending to its regional interests and pulling smaller neighbors along in its wake. ..

China has taken the lead in organizing an East Asian summit conference for next November that, according to Chinese and other observers, will formalize Chinese regional leadership in several aspects. A senior Chinese diplomat said it had not been decided whether the United States will be invited to attend and, if so, in what capacity. That the question of U.S. participation is even on the table dramatizes the shift in Asia's diplomatic landscape. ..

China's new face has been most apparent in its dealings with the ASEAN countries, mainly because of the economic equation. At China's initiative, for instance, ASEAN countries and China in December agreed to create a free-trade zone by 2010, which would further integrate neighboring countries into China's orbit.

Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN countries has increased about 20 percent a year since 1990, and the pace has picked up in the last several years. Bilateral trade hit $78.2 billion in 2003, up 42.8 percent from the previous year. Chinese and ASEAN officials said the figure was about $100 billion and rising by the end of 2004. ..

During the days of war and Japanese dominance, for instance, allied forces fought to prevent Tokyo from constructing a railroad from southern China through Vietnam, Laos and down to Singapore as a conduit for oil supplies. Now, Tao remarked, China has announced plans to build just such a railway. "

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:01:51 GMT

Bush Gets Stoned by the World Media: "President Bush all but admits to illicit drug use for the first time. Overseas it's the stuff of headlines. At home, the U.S. press has generally downplayed the story. The divergent coverage of Bush's apparent drug use is a textbook study in the difference between the international online media and their American counterparts. On the issue of youthful illicit drug use, most U.S. news editors -- liberal, conservative or other -- defer to Bush in a way that their foreign counterparts do not.

The New York Times broke the Bush marijuana story Friday in a front-page report on Doug Wead, a Christian activist who has published a book based in part on conversations with Bush that Wead secretly recorded in 1998 and 1999. On Wead's tapes, whose authenticity the White House does not dispute, Bush came close to admitting he had smoked marijuana and avoided answering a question about whether he had used cocaine.

"I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried," Bush said. On a question about cocaine, Bush said he would reply, "Rather than saying no ... I think it's time for someone to draw the line and look people in the eye and say, you know, 'I'm not going to participate in ugly rumors about me and blame my opponents,' and hold the line. Stand up for a system that will not allow this kind of crap to go on,'" according to a transcript excerpt posted on ABC's "Good Morning America" Web site.

Since Bush has never acknowledged using drugs, the international media played up the marijuana angle. .. In contrast, most of the traditional leaders of American journalism -- the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the TV networks -- made no mention of drugs in their headlines .. the news was not "pot" but the "past," a word choice that signaled that the accompanying news story was not really new."

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:43:31 GMT

How E2 works: July 2002: "Automakers said the new limits on emissions that state lawmakers were considering would hurt the economy and prevent consumers from buying sport-utility vehicles. Environmentalists said they would help curb global warming. Into the fray stepped Environmental Entrepreneurs, insisting that business and environmental interests are not at odds.

Last week's passage of the Assembly bill limiting greenhouse-gas emissions -- the first of its kind in the country -- was just what Nicole Lederer and Bob Epstein envisioned for Environmental Entrepreneurs, a 2-year-old group of business leaders who support environmental causes.

E2, as the group is known, presented undecided Assembly members with business leaders -- mostly Silicon Valley financiers and tech executives -- who supported the bill. That gave politicians a defense against the charge that they were anti-business. ``They were essential to the passage of the bill,'' said Anne Baker, a staff member for Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Woodland Hills, who created the bill. ``They wrote Op-Eds, they wrote to legislators, they came here and met with members of the state Assembly on a regular basis. They were relentless.'' ..

Rick deGolia, chief executive of Fonelet Technology, a San Francisco start-up, appreciates the approach E2 takes, particularly how it makes presentations, called "ecosalons,'' to members about environmental issues. "They're professional, sophisticated, mature,'' said deGolia, who hosted one on the oceans last year at his home. "They're helpful to me to gain expert knowledge from people who are really dedicating their lives to environmental issues and presenting them in a way that's very valuable to business leaders.''

A call to action from E2 often means clicking ``Yes'' in response to an e-mail asking for permission to use the member's name and professional status in literature supporting a legislative goal. To rally behind Pavley's emissions bill in March, E2 gathered 86 names over e-mail and submitted them to legislators as evidence that the business community was in favor of tougher environmental policy.

E2 is a select group. It requires a minimum contribution of $1,000 to the NRDC to join; so far E2 has raised $1.8 million. Epstein also has started a pet project called E2 Venture Endowment -- a fund to support start-ups working on technology that helps the environment or makes another technology cleaner."

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:53:28 GMT

SITE Institute: Map of Future Al-Qaeda Operations: "A message posted to a leading al-Qaeda-frequented Jihadist message board on February 12, 2005, purports to answer the questions: “What is the future of al-Qaeda? And what will the upcoming operations be?” " Answers include:

new mass event in the US, years in the making
disruption of oil infrastructure in the Gulf
assassination of US-allied Arab leaders

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:48:15 GMT

John Robb covers Iraq's "controlled chaos": Many useful links on a story that deserves more coverage. "Loyalist paramilitaries are growing rapidly in Iraq (called "pop-ups" by the US military). This is in response to the collapse in the attempts to build an Iraqi security system. .. The allure is that these groups are morally more cohesive than traditional government units. .. As I anticipated, this development is being welcomed by the US military as a way to exit from Iraq ("controlled chaos"). ..

[Quoting WSJ:] As these irregular units proliferate, U.S. officials face a thorny dilemma: whether to encourage these forces, whose training and experience varies wildly, or to try to rein them in. "There is a tension between on the one hand encouraging and fostering initiative and on the other executing the plan for the Iraqi Security Forces that everyone agreed on," says Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. "To be candid, I would err on the side of fostering initiative. I want to get the hell out of here." .. "When I saw them and where they were living I decided this was a horse to back," the U.S. general says today. He agreed to give the fledgling unit money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons. "

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:33:01 GMT

MSNBC - U.S. contractors in Iraq allege abuses: "Employees of a U.S. private contractor hired by the U.S. military to protect supplies say the brutality they witnessed against Iraqis led them to quit."

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:48:34 GMT

Sy Hersh lecture on Iraq, the neo-cons, and torture. 20 minute video.

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:56:50 GMT

Thomas L. Friedman: No Mullah Left Behind: Excellent NYT column, reprinted widely in the US and overseas (India, Pakistan, Europe). "The [WSJ] added, the conservative mullahs are feeling even more emboldened to argue that with high oil prices, Iran doesn't need Western investment capital and should feel "free to pursue its nuclear power program without interference." This is a perfect example of the Bush energy policy at work, and the Bush energy policy is: "No Mullah Left Behind."

By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that? ..

[We need] a "geo-green" strategy. As a geo-green, I believe that combining environmentalism and geopolitics is the most moral and realistic strategy the U.S. could pursue today. Imagine if President Bush used his bully pulpit and political capital to focus the nation on sharply lowering energy consumption and embracing a gasoline tax.

What would that buy? It would buy reform in some of the worst regimes in the world, from Tehran to Moscow. It would reduce the chances that the U.S. and China are going to have a global struggle over oil - which is where we are heading. It would help us to strengthen the dollar and reduce the current account deficit by importing less crude. It would reduce climate change more than anything in Kyoto. It would significantly improve America's standing in the world by making us good global citizens. It would shrink the budget deficit. It would reduce our dependence on the Saudis so we could tell them the truth. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) And it would pull China away from its drift into supporting some of the worst governments in the world, like Sudan's, because it needs their oil. Most important, making energy independence our generation's moon shot could help inspire more young people to go into science and engineering, which we desperately need.

Sadly, the Bush team won't even consider this. .. President Bush has a better project: borrowing another trillion dollars, which will make us that much more dependent on countries like China and Saudi Arabia that hold our debt - so that you might, if you do everything right and live long enough, get a few more bucks out of your Social Security account.

The president's priorities are totally nuts."

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 07:06:53 GMT

Winners and sinners on global warming: Good story on how the Kyoto Protocol was improved under US pressure, and how it has finally come into force.

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 07:50:26 GMT

Ethiopians unite for Marley anniversary: "About 200,000 people gathered in Ethiopia's capital Sunday to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the birth of reggae icon Bob Marley. The concert, dubbed Africa Unite and billed as the country's largest ever, marks the first time the late reggae star's birthday celebrations have ever been held outside his native Jamaica. Marley, who died of cancer in 1981. .. Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson also declared an official year-long celebration to honour Marley's birth." In the 80s, I spent 5 years on the road in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I don't think I spent a week without hearing Marley's music in the street or on the radio. Long live liberation music.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:04:47 GMT

EPIC 2014: Very amusing flash projection of media in 2014. Worth all 8 minutes.

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 07:08:28 GMT

Phone Scoop - database of cell phone specs & features: Nifty search & compare by carrier and many attributes of phones.

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:43:09 GMT

Investing for Change: Good review of socially responsible investing (SRI), from a Microsoft millionaire. Interesting recent history: In general, "SRI funds are at least as profitable as, or more profitable than, the Standard & Poor's 500 index, which is the traditional benchmark of performance for mutual funds and individual stocks. In his interview with Grist, eco-portfolio director Patsky said, "That proved true under Reagan, and Bush I, and Clinton: Stocks of companies that were good environmental citizens outperformed those that weren't." Amy Domini, founder of Domini Social Investments, says the Domini 400 Index has outperformed the S&P over the past year, the past three years, and the past 10 years. "

But not true under Bush II. I suspect that oil and miltary stocks had something to do with that. And: Matt Patsky, portfolio director of Winslow Management Co., a "green" investing firm, recently told the environmental magazine Grist that " . . . for the first time ever, over the last two years . . . the best performing stocks in the S&P 500 were the companies that have been the most flagrant environmental polluters. .. Investors are starting to believe there is no liability: that the EPA is ineffective, that there is no enforcement, and that polluters will never have to pay the piper."

One graphic example: "Last November, the Los Angeles Times reported an epidemic of 50,000 young children sickened by ingesting rat poison after the Bush administration removed two safety requirements for manufacturers: an ingredient that makes the poison taste bitter and a dye to make it more obvious when it's ingested. The Washington Post reported that the Natural Resources Defense Council has documents "showing that Bush's EPA not only worked hand in hand with the industry, but also complied when manufacturers wanted the risks associated with rat poison downplayed in EPA assessments." "

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:55:44 GMT

Michael Crichton and Global Warming: "How do people learn about global warming? That, more than the merits of any scientific argument, is the most interesting question posed by Michael Crichton's State of Fear." Excellent review of the popular argument on warming, from Brookings' David Sandalow.

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:29:44 GMT

Scott Ritter speculates on the al-Zarqawi myth: "Reflecting back, one cannot help but wonder if al-Zarqawi was used as a lure to trap the Americans into taking this action. On the surface, the al-Zarqawi organisation seems too good to be true. A single Jordanian male is suddenly running an organisation that operates in sophisticated cells throughout Iraq. No one man could logically accomplish this. But there is an organisation that can - the Mukhabarat (intelligence) of Saddam Hussein.

A critical element of this resistance was to generate chaos and anarchy that would destabilise any US-appointed Iraqi government..

According to former Iraqi intelligence personnel I have communicated with recently, the Mukhabarat, under instructions from Saddam Hussein, had been preparing for some time before the invasion of Iraq on how to survive, resist and defeat any US-led occupation of Iraq. A critical element of this resistance was to generate chaos and anarchy that would destabilise any US-appointed Iraqi government.

Another factor was to shift the attention of the US military away from the true heart of the resistance - Saddam's Baathist loyalists - and on to a fictional target that could be manipulated in an effort to control the pace, timing and nature of the US military response.

According to these sources, the selection of al-Zarqawi as a front for these actions was almost too easy. .. According to my contacts, the goal in creating a foreign Islamist face for the violence taking place in Iraq is to get the Iraqi populace to turn away from Iyad Allawi and the US military as a source of stability, and endorse the return of the Baathists (under a new guise, to be sure), who would then deal with the Islamists by shutting down an operation the Mukhabarat thinks they control.

But engaging these activists may not be without cost. Having created a fiction, there is a potential danger of it becoming a reality. Al-Zarqawi may not be the real force behind the anti-US resistance in Iraq, but many now, in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, believe him to be.

Having created this giant the Mukhabarat may not be able to control it. The real danger in Iraq is not the inevitable defeat of the United States and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, but the fact that the longer it takes for the United States to realise that victory cannot be achieved, the more emboldened the Islamists become. " An AP correspondent carries on the thread, quoting Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic International Studies among others.

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:17:58 GMT

Reflections By An Arab Jew - Ella Shohat. Compelling, personal history lesson.

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:10:14 GMT

A haunting end to hunt for WMD: Great editorial [14 Jan 2005]. "This week’s news that the Pentagon has officially ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was the quiet denouement to one of the most contentious issues in our nation’s recent history. While the beginning of the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s rumored chemical, biological and nuclear weapons came in like a lion, it went out like a lamb.

The final chapter of a story that has dominated American newspapers’ front pages for more than two years was published deep inside them. The Virginian-Pilot ran the news on Page A6, along with several routine stories and a gutter cleaning ad. Most other papers did the same. A few, such as The Washington Post, posted the story on its front page, but tucked it into an unobtrusive, below-the-fold corner. ..

And America is left with a seemingly endless war in Iraq, but without a rationale for it.

A senior intelligence official told The Washington Post that chief weapons hunter Charles Duelfer’s interim report to Congress, which contradicted nearly every prewar claim of the Bush administration, will stand as the group’s final conclusion. While the official end to our hunt for weapons is a sad, significant milestone, almost more noteworthy is our — Americans’ and the media’s — muted reaction to that news. The story’s placement in the folds of the paper reflects its place in our thoughts. We’ve made note of it, but parked it in an out-of-the-way corner where it won’t demand or command our attention.

It’s a national humiliation akin to a personal one: It’s too painful to dwell on. Dead U.S. soldiers, dead Iraqi civilians, a war with no end in sight — it makes us cringe. So, we expel it from our minds, if not our lives, bury it and move on.

We’re in Iraq now, we tell ourselves. We have to make it work. But while we can hide this story in our newspapers and in the backs of our minds, the consequences of our failure to find WMD will haunt us, one way or another, for decades to come. "

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 07:45:36 GMT

Juan Cole reviews the events leading up to this election: Worth remembering how far US policy has had to move, and how slowly. "The Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections. ..

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. .. This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament. .. this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan. ..

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear.

Iraq now faces many key issues that could tear the country apart, from the issues of Kirkuk and Mosul to that of religious law. James Zogby on Wolf Blitzer wisely warned the US public against another "Mission Accomplished" moment."

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 07:27:34 GMT

Civil war scenario: Juan Cole outlines one way that civil war could emerge in Iraq. "Things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. .. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq's revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani's aides... Mind you, if the elected Iraqi parliament asks for a withdrawal timetable, I think the US has an absolute duty to comply. It is a different issue as to whether such a move is wise or could succeed without the Iraqis paying an even higher price than they have already paid."

Earlier, Cole reviewed the pros and cons of withdrawal and offered, "One solution to this latter problem might be to set a timetable for withdrawal of Coalition land forces, but for the US and its allies to continue to offer the new Iraqi government's army close air support in any battles with the neo-Baathists and jihadis that might try to take advantage of the withdrawal to make a coup and institute a bloodbath."

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:00:33 GMT

Soaring global warming 'can't be ruled out': Results from the world's largest climate modeling experiment, reported in Nature. "The Earth may be much more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, according to the first results from a massive distributed-computing project. The project tested thousands of climate models and found that some produced a world that warmed by a huge 11.5°C when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached the levels expected to be seen later this century. This extreme result is surprising because it lies far outside the 1.4°C to 4.5°C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same CO2-level increase..

"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the world," he explains. Stainforth and his colleagues set up www.climateprediction.net to see what happened when models were not tuned in this way. "

About the calculations: "From Uruguay to Uzbekistan and Sierra Leone to Singapore, 95,000 people from 150 countries are taking part in the climateprediction.net experiment to explore the possible impact of global warming. By downloading free software from www.climateprediction.net on their personal computers, participants run their own unique version of Britain's Met Office climate model. While their computer is idle, the program runs a climate simulation over days or weeks and automatically reports the results to Oxford University and other collaborating institutions around the world. Together, the volunteers have simulated more than 4 million model years, donated 8,000 years of computer time and exceeded the processing power of the world's largest supercomputers. The first results of the continuing experiment are reported in the latest edition of the science journal Nature." My computers have been running these models since the project started. Amazing how well-behaved the software has been, running imperceptibly in the background.

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:35:54 GMT

In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data: Introduction to Choicepoint and the privatization of domestic national security surveillance. Combined with the growth of private surveillance cameras and data collection, it's not a pretty future. Can anyone watch the watchers? Links on "sousveillance" start here.

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 06:25:08 GMT

A Cell Phone to Detect Radiation: Interesting packaging of a radiation detector with a GPS unit in a cell phone, all for under $1000. The plan is to give them to DHS and police staff -- and to postal workers, and other delivery people who cover distances and routes, to sniff out radioactive materials if (as) they move around.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:57:26 GMT

The New York Review of Books: Europe vs. America. There were many facts and a fresh perspective worth saving in this long aritcle. So I condensed it here.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:07:21 GMT

'Inch of snow' shuts down air marshals: "Hundreds of federal air marshals were grounded and unable to access critical information to pinpoint potential terrorist activity for eight hours on the eve of President Bush's inauguration after snow paralyzed the Mission Operations Center in Washington, said several air marshals and a supervisor. .. hundreds of flights were rerouted because of the snow, and marshals seeking information on reports of a dirty bomb in Boston were unsuccessful. ..

"The guys in the field were stuck and didn't know what was going on, other than they were not to call MOC because they did not have enough people staffing it," the supervisor said. "The president's inauguration was the whole purpose of increased coverage. If they can't handle one inch of snow, what if it is truly an emergency? It was just a total meltdown," the supervisor said. .. When told the "meltdown" was caused by weather delays in Washington, the air marshal said: "It's called the Weather Channel. They should watch it and be prepared to staff for it." " Michael Helfrich sees an IT opportunity: "the tactical edge of the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) relies heavily on the phone and PDA as a form-factor. Given the complete availability of HTTP services through WIFI, CDMA, and GSM-enabled devices, there is a huge opportunity for the distribution of information and other services for organizations like FAMS."

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:19:16 GMT

Secret Intelligence and the 'War on Terror': Thomas Powers on the decline of CIA trustworthiness, and the failures of and prospects for the Bush administration. "Following Bush's reelection we must expect the question of American intentions to enter the discussion in the foreign chanceries of the entire world. These intentions are not transparent. The administration first argued that it sought only to disarm Saddam. When that turned out to be unnecessary it was ready with a new argument - replacing Saddam with a free, democratic government would create a beacon of hope and a light unto the nations, persuading terrorists to give up the struggle and changing the political landscape of the Middle East.

Maybe that was the real reason all along, and maybe not. Foreign governments may feel that a better guide would be the President's national security strategy issued in late 2001. There the administration argued for a policy of preemption, and a forward policy projecting American military power into the heart of the Middle East. A forward policy requires client states on the ground. What sort of client states? How big a military presence? To remain how long? Those are the kind of questions foreign chanceries will want to answer. "

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 06:28:32 GMT

Foreign Policy: War on Evil: A brief note from Robert Wright on how absolutist notions of evil (like, apparently, Bush's) are dangerously misleadling. "Some conservatives dismiss liberal qualms about Bush’s talk of evil as knee-jerk moral relativism. But rejecting his conception of evil doesn’t mean rejecting the idea of moral absolutes, of right and wrong, good and bad. Evil in the Manichaean sense isn’t just absolute badness. It’s a grand unified explanation of such badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source. ..

For the forces of good [a] unity of badness greatly simplifies the question of strategy. If all of your enemies are Satan’s puppets, there’s no point in drawing fine distinctions among them. No need to figure out which ones are irredeemable and which can be bought off. They’re all bad to the bone, so just fight them at every pass, bear any burden, and so on.

But what if the world isn’t that simple? What if some terrorists will settle for nothing less than the United States’ destruction, whereas others just want a nationalist enclave in Chechnya or Mindanao? And what if treating all terrorists the same—as all having equally illegitimate goals—makes them more the same, more uniformly anti-American, more zealous? (Note that President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” formulation didn’t court this danger; the Soviet threat was already monolithic.)

Or what if Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are actually different kinds of problems? And what if their rulers, however many bad things they’ve done, are still human beings who respond rationally to clear incentives? If you’re truly open to this possibility, you might be cheered when a hideous dictator, under threat of invasion, allows U.N. weapons inspectors to search his country. But if you believe this dictator is not just bad but evil, you’ll probably conclude that you should invade his country anyway. You don’t make deals with the devil.

And, of course, if you believe that all terrorists are truly evil, then you’ll be less inclined to fret about the civil liberties of suspected terrorists, or about treating accused or convicted terrorists decently in prison. .. Abandoning such counterproductive metaphysics doesn’t mean slipping into relativism.. You could believe that somewhere in human nature is a bad seed that underlies many of the terrible things people do. If you’re a Christian, you might think of this seed as original sin. If you’re not religious, you might see it in secular terms—for example, as a core selfishness that can skew our moral perspective, inclining us to tolerate, even welcome, the suffering of people who threaten our interests.

This idea of evil as something at work in all of us makes for a perspective very different than the one that seems to guide the president. It could lead you to ask, If we’re all born with this seed of badness, why does it bear more fruit in some people than others? And this question could lead you to analyze evildoers in their native environments, and thus distinguish between the causes of terrorism in one place and in another. "

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 07:12:39 GMT

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: The Pentagon's New Map (Esquire): A provocative, if somewhat simplistic and miltaristic, grand strategy. "Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and - most important - the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. ..

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

This country has successfully exported security to globalization’s Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle Ease have been inconsistent—in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities." The author recognizes the role of human rights, the rule of law, and economic development in globalization, but considers security and stability to be their predecessor more than their consequence.

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 08:21:52 GMT

Adam Werbach on the death of environmentalism: Provocative speech advocating the conversion of environmentalists into progressives. "For 30 years American liberals have defined themselves according to a set of problem categories that divide us, whether they be racial, gender, economic or environmental. We have spent far less time defining ourselves according to the values that unite us, such as shared prosperity, progress, interdependence, fairness, ecological restoration and equality. We can no longer afford the laundry list of “-isms” to define and divide our world and ourselves. ..

My thesis tonight is this: the ability of environmentalism, as a language, an ideology, a set of practices, and network of institutions, can not deal with the most pressing ecological challenges facing the planet because it is so tightly bound to a rationality that reduces our worlds into these dyads [like humans/nature, men/women, healthy/sick, reason/emotion]. The moment we free ourselves from this modern way of thinking by creating a new language, a new set of strategic initiatives, a new set of institutions, and a new metric for evaluating our success, we cease to be “environmentalists” in any meaningful sense of the term and open ourselves up to the possibility of becoming progressive Americans. ..

We are moving toward becoming progressives. We are bringing along our love of nature. We are bringing along our knowledge of interdependence." The 'New Apollo' project idea is presented as a narrative that integrates progressive and environmental ideas, including jobs, less reliance on mideast oil, the government as instrument of public values.

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 05:36:24 GMT

Learn from Britain's pension reform: Thatcher's Britain tried partial privatisation of old-age benefits, and the result is a massive failure. As usual, Americans neglect to study other nations for lessons and warnings on its own policies. "
For all the fanfare that surrounds the Bush administration’s efforts to present a bold new idea on pension reform, the truth is that it is not new at all. In fact, the proposal looks suspiciously like the plan set in train during Thatcher’s ﬁrst term in 1979 and which has since led Britain to the brink of a crisis. .. Britain’s [reform] has been a failure. A shorthand explanation for what has gone wrong is that the costs and risks of running private investment accounts outweigh the value of the returns they are likely to earn. ..

there is little disagreement within the United Kingdom that the path chosen by successive governments over the past 25 years is not the right one ..

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, in 2004 alone, 500,000 people abandoned private pensions and moved back into the state system. Government actuaries expect another 250,000 to [do so] this year.
In 2004, the Association of British Insurers, the trade association representing the companies that sell the private accounts, made a collective decision not to risk any more allegations of mis-selling. It urged all of its member ﬁrms to warn those who had taken tax rebates to open private accounts that they might have made a bad choice. The advice was particularly aimed at older workers with fewer years until retirement.
Many insurance companies -- the sellers of the private accounts -- have been writing their customers urging them to contract back in to the state system.
And, of course, even the U.K. version of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed the idea of raising taxes to increase beneﬁt levels.

.. at the exact moment that America contemplates replicating this disaster, many in Britain -- some conservatives included -- are looking more and more kindly on American Social Security as a model for reform."

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 22:17:55 GMT

`Bumpy' new world foreseen: Jan 14, 2005: The US govt National Intelligence Council released a report, Project 2020, looking 15 years ahead. "Newly arriving powers "have the potential to render obsolete the old categories of East and West, North and South.'' .. The council predicts an emergence of new global players — almost certainly China and India — but whether these new players fit into the world co-operatively or competitively remains an important uncertainty for the U.S. .. the integration of 1 billion low-paid workers will cause global shifts in rich and poor nations alike. .. "Of course, the United States is in good shape to participate in this world, but it will be a world that will be much more competitive for us," ..

this new order will raise the stakes for Arab countries, which may join in globalization trends or experience further alienation and humiliation. Terror threats, too, will change. While radical extremism will continue to grow, the report says Al Qaeda is expected to be superseded by similarly inspired, decentralized groups. [Chairman] Hutchings said he expects the innovation in terror attacks to come from new elements of surprise, rather than unconventional weapons. The groups' members will be tapping technology that provides instant connections for communications and training, posing a significant intelligence challenge to organizations including the CIA." Reminds me of the scenarios in Ten Years Later by Richard A. Clarke in the January Atlantic, in which new terrorist attacks are low tech but launched in coordinated ways in surprising places.

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:48:38 GMT

'Our government in Burma is lying when it says just a few people were killed': Aid workers "say the death toll is certain to be higher than Burmese officials have admitted. "It is in the thousands," estimated one foreign diplomat. ..

Since the tsunami the military's grip has become even tighter. Conscript soldiers have been deployed on main roads leading out of the southern town of Kawthaung. They have orders to prevent foreign nationals from travelling more than two miles from the centre. The naval vessels are looking for boats that they do not recognise in order to prevent unauthorised missions landing along the ravaged coastline. ..

A government official intercepted our vehicle as we left Kawthaung with the aim of catching a glimpse of the damage wreaked on one of the world's last dictatorships. "Go back now," he told us. "I cannot give you permission to leave town and the army checkpoints will stop you. There is nothing to see. We are handling the situation in our own way." ..

Rangoon brushed aside most offers of help, accepting a token £104,000 worth of aid from communist China. .. [Aid organizations are prevented from visiting nearby islands and coastal areas] Further clues to the extent of the damage come, however, in reports of foreigners who are missing in the area. Two South African backpackers and a group of Christian charity workers have not been in contact with friends and relatives for a week. A Florida-based missionary group has launched an appeal to rebuild a Burmese village destroyed in the tsunami. From the government, however, there is no word."

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:44:46 GMT

The politics of disaster: What happened in Burma from the Tsunami is still unknown. "for the first three days, the official version was that Burma had survived without a scratch. The uniformed gangsters who run the kleptocracy, ravish its forests and murder its citizens, expressed their heart-felt sorrow and decent regret at the news from the rest of the region, but made no mention of the waves taking Burmese lives. A meteorological officer from Rangoon explained the miracle. The border with Thailand may only be 150 miles north of the devastated hotels of Phuket, but Burma was fortunate to have a coastline which rose from shallow seas. ..

On Wednesday the hacks on the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's mouthpiece, admitted that 43 people had died and 25 were missing. Few believed them. Ever since Boxing Day, opponents of the regime who produce the Democratic Voice of Burma website have been receiving leads from scattered sources. An anonymous naval officer told them that a military installation on Coco Island in the Indian Ocean had been washed away. Magye Island in the Gulf of Bengalmay also had been swamped, other sources said. There were reports of the Maubin University building being torn apart, possibly by an earthquake which hit after the waves, of fishermen never returning from the sea and of villages losing dozens of inhabitants. One rumour doing the rounds says that 500 died in one district alone, and it sounds plausible... the inhabitants of the coastal districts are desperately poor. Their flimsy shacks never looked as if they could withstand a raging sea. ..

It will take weeks to find out if the real death toll is anywhere near as bad as in Thailand - if, that is, we ever find out. The junta has an interest in maintaining the illusion of total control.. Last week reporters who tried to get information from the Unicef office in Rangoon were given a short course on the facts of life. The aid workers stonewalled because they would be thrown out of the country if they said a word out of place. ..

In Burma, many charities have decided that giving aid to Rangoon is like giving EU grants to Sicily or oil-for-food programmes to Saddam's Iraq: whatever your good intentions, the money always ends up strengthening one mafia or another. Thus, while Unicef, Save the Children and a handful of other organisations cling on, most won't go near the place. They know that what Burma needs isn't hand-outs but a revolution. "

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:26:28 GMT

Nuclear test monitoring network useful: Here's a tidbit from Cringeley: "Here is word from a reader in the UK: "The infrastructure for a global tsunami warning system already exists. The system set up to monitor nuclear testing is capable of, detected, and pinpointed the South Asian tsunami as it happened. The monitoring headquarters is in Berkshire, England, and the head of the station had made suggestions in the past that its role be expanded to include earthquake and tsunami monitoring. Better still, the necessary treaties are in place to allow immediate two-way communication between the centre and affected countries. Indeed, they carry an up to date list of contact numbers for key people. What's missing is political will. With that in place organisations, public information, and training can be put in place to make sure any warning is responded to on the ground."' I recall seeing a map of the placement of their monitoring devicesand the satcoms that relay their information (uniformly spread around the planet). Interesting to think of the other uses of that sensor network.

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:06:37 GMT

The Pen, Too, Is a Tool for Rebuilding: A view of tsunami reconstruction in India, where the local government and NGO sector are leading. "It occurs to me that the tsunami has done something not even Mahatma Gandhi could: It has brought fundamentalists together to work for a common cause. Since Dec. 26, three sworn enemies have been working with each other on the relief effort: The RSS, the Hindu extremists who are part of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party; their fierce rivals, the Marxists in the Communist Party of India; and the Jamaat, the authorities who run the mosques and serve the Muslim community. ..

The politician told me that the government will endeavor to rehabilitate the islanders on shore. One of my traveling companions, an engineer from Madras, whispers to me that politicians aren't afraid of breaking promises, they're only afraid of the press.

And he's right. India has a dozen 24-hour news channels -- the most in the world. They're all offering nonstop coverage of the disaster and the relief efforts. So much scrutiny is focues on the government, relief organizations, and politicians about their responses to the devastation that any slipups become national news and prompt heated debates. Although I had wanted to volunteer to help with relief efforts, I now don't mind being a reporter again."

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:00:59 GMT

War Crimes: A strongly worded editorial from the Washington Post in December calls this not "scandal" but "war crimes". "Thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false. Though they represent only part of the record that lies in government files, the documents show that the abuse of prisoners was already occurring at Guantanamo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after the outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs."

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 06:57:21 GMT

American Gothic: A long provocative piece from Tom Engelhardt, with collected links to the successive torture revelations and the broader themes of this administration. "as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." .. Extraction of information was always secondary at the highest levels to the freeing of the President from all constraints ..

Fighting for [you fill in the blank]. That sums up our present Bush moment. In fact, little that this country does from diplomacy to torture to foreign aid is any longer imaginable absent the military. We are a nation whose public face -- however we may still think of ourselves -- is no longer a civilian one, not just in Iraq but in the world at large.."

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 06:39:49 GMT

"Digby" on values:: A particularly trenchant blogger says it well. On values: "If either party could give them the real thing instead of an ersatz, superficial rendering of smarmy religiosity, they would gain the support of a large majority of this country. You have to give Rove credit. He has done a lot with what he has to work with. Sexual priggishness, vengeance and racism are very difficult concepts upon which to build a positice values argument, but they've managed to create the illusion that they have "moral clarity" by garbing their narrow vision in religious and patriotic terms --- and because we have failed to stand up for our universal values of liberty, justice and equality. They win by default. "

And on the scandal at Guantanamo: "Now we find that in addition to a bunch of false intelligence gained through torture and other means, we are going to lock up a lot of these guys at Gitmo forever. Sadly, we can't give them any kind of due process because we don't have enough evidence. And that's because many of them were innocent of any affiliation with the Taliban or al Qaeda and many others were very low level grunts. But they've known this for years [in a mid-2002 CIA analysis].. It gets worse, though. Since we kidnapped these innocent men and threw them into a hellish gulag they have, unsurprisingly, become radicalized... And it's you and me and your kids who they hate now, not just the leadership or the troops. They hate us personally. And they hate us because we don't seem too worked up about this disgusting breach of human rights. In fact, a majority apparently think it's just dandy, including the most powerful leaders in the land who continue to support the war criminals who concieved this disasterous blunder, even this week elevating one of them to the highest law enforcement office in the land.

So let's have another lecture on morality and values. I really need to hear one. Let's hear some more talk about how liberals are leading this country down the path to perdition with our lack of restraint and our inability to draw lines between right and wrong and good and evil. I need to bask in the glow of republican righteousness and beg for forgiveness for sinfully indulging gays in their quest to form families and cleanse myself of the shame of forgiving a man for committing adultery. God help me, I need some moral clarity and I need it damned quickly because I'm really wondering just who in the hell is evil in this war on terror and who isn't. It's getting hard to tell the difference here."

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:28:32 GMT

Shades of Gray: Another example of how the war on terror is misnamed; sometimes they are "our" terrorists. And as it turns out, sometimes the same people were Saddam's terrorists too. (I've seen other articles detail US cooperation with Saddam in supporting anti-Iran groups like these prior to 1991). "The Duelfer report alleges that Saddam gave funds to a listed terror group. But the claim does little to advance the White House case for war..

Duelfer’s evidence linking the MEK to the burgeoning Oil-for-Food scandal comes from 13 secret lists that were maintained by Iraqi oil officials of favored recipients for vouchers for the sale of oil overseas. Duelfer’s report says the Iraqi government maintained a rigorous high-level process for nominating foreign companies or individuals who were to be awarded the Oil-for-Food vouchers and that Saddam himself personally signed off on every name that was put (or struck off) the list. ..

Saddam is known to have supported the group for years as a potential subversive force against the theocratic mullahs in Tehran. Just last year, the U.S. Treasury Department shut down the operations of an affiliated group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, on the grounds that it was serving as the political front—with an office at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.—for the MEK.

But at the same time, the MEK has been championed for years by leading members of Congress who, like its spokesman, have described it as a legitimate resistance movement opposing a tyrannical government run by religious fanatics. As recently as four years ago, more than 200 members of Congress signed statements endorsing the National Council’s cause (including prominent Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Missouri GOP Sen. Kit Bond.) ..

The question of how to view the MEK has intensified in the wake of the war in Iraq. After the invasion, U.S. troops rounded up thousands of MEK militants, viewing them at first as terrorists who had been aligned with Saddam. But the Bush administration was divided over what to do with them. Some Pentagon hard-liners and neoconservative political activists pushed last year to provide the group with secret U.S. backing as part of a broader covert campaign to destabilize the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.

But Bush ultimately rejected that move on the grounds that it would send mixed messages in the war on terror, one administration official said. In the meantime, administration moderates, including officials at the State Department, argued, by contrast, that not only should MEK militants in Iraq be rounded up and disarmed, but that the US should consider some sort of deal with Tehran whereby MEK fighters in Iraq would be turned over to Iranian authorities. In exchange, State Department officials contended, Iranian authorities might be persuaded to deport or extradite Al Qaeda leaders .. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been methodically reviewing the status of about 3,800 MEK militants at Camp Ashraf, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. "

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 05:09:09 GMT

MSNBC - Report: Mess-hall suicide bomber was Saudi: "The suicide bomber who killed 22 people when he blew himself up in a U.S. mess hall in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was a Saudi medical student, an Arab newspaper reported Monday.. [His] father said he learned Dec. 16 that his son had withdrawn all the money left in a Sudanese bank account for him and later received a phone call from his son telling him that he was in Iraq to fight the Americans. The al-Ghamdis are a large Saudi clan, three members of which were among the Sept. 11 hijackers."

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:37:31 GMT

Fritz Institute: Develops software and shares best practices in disaster relief logistics. Good resource for background information, case studies, and links to practitioners.

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:31:43 GMT

Groove-based efforts in Sri Lanka: S.B.Chatterjee reports on Virtual Volunteering with information moving through Groove spaces, building on networks of NGOs there (including Info-Share).

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:27:19 GMT

Sumatran Surfariis - Surfing Indonesia: A number of local Indonesian tourism and shipping companies are organizing bottom-up delivery of relief packages by sea. Susi Johnston in Bali is blogging details on the ground, with photos. Assistance from the US is coming via the IDEP Foundation . [Via Julia Lerman]

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 02:17:06 GMT

Iraq's civilian dead get no hearing in the United States: Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs is concerned about civilian deaths in Iraq, and gets an article pulished -- in Lebanon's Daily Star, apparently not picked up elsewhere except by peace groups. "Evidence is mounting that America's war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and perhaps well over 100,000. Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths ..

In late October, the British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began. The sample survey documented an extra 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths compared to the death rate in the preceding year, when Saddam Hussein was still in power .. America's public reaction has been as remarkable as the Lancet study, for the reaction has been no reaction. On Oct. 29 the vaunted New York Times ran a single story of 770 words on page 8 of the paper. The Times reporter apparently did not interview a single Bush administration or U.S. military official. No follow-up stories or editorials appeared, and no Times reporters assessed the story on the ground. Coverage in other U.S. papers was similarly meager. The Washington Post, also on Oct. 29, carried a single 758-word story on page 16. Recent reporting on the bombing of Fallujah has also been an exercise in self-denial. ..

Violence is only one reason for the increase in civilian deaths in Iraq. Children in urban war zones die in vast numbers from diarrhea, respiratory infections and other causes, owing to unsafe drinking water, lack of refrigerated foods, and acute shortages of blood and basic medicines in clinics and hospitals ..

The U.S. is killing massive numbers of Iraqi civilians, embittering the population and many in the Islamic world, and laying the ground for escalating violence and death. .. The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, American public opinion, media, and the recent election victory of the Bush administration have left the world's most powerful military without practical restraint."

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 01:22:41 GMT

Israelis hasten land grab in shadow of wall: Even today, settlements are expanding, with US blessing: "The bulldozers were preparing the ground for hundreds of new homes, despite the Israeli government's claim that it is not expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Like other building work along the route of the barrier, it seems to be an attempt to ensure that the land between the fence and the 1967 border remains in Israeli hands in any final agreement with the Palestinians. .. [Zufim and] at least five other sites along the barrier have settlement work in progress. Israeli human rights groups say the government appears to be racing to fill in the gap between the barrier and the Israeli border before a US team arrives next year to mark out the final limits of settlement expansion. ..

Yehezkel Lein, a researcher for another Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, said the military government in the occupied territories had issued permits for the work. He added: "In the plan for Zufim there is an extension to the north of the settlement that was already approved. There is also another expansion to the east. But there is no territorial contiguity between Zufim and the new construction, so it is really a new settlement." ..

Last week the US national security council adviser on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, told a closed meeting of Jewish leaders that Washington saw settlements to the east of the barrier as ultimately intended for removal. But he said Israel would be allowed to hold on those to the west, which include Zufim. "

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:18:11 GMT

Tsunami cisaster may be Sweden's Sept. 11: "The confirmed Swedish death toll is 59, but more than 3,500 Swedes who were vacationing in Thailand and Sri Lanka are missing. Authorities here believe a majority of them are dead. .. Police said that 10,000 out of an estimated 25,000 Swedes who were vacationing in Asia had arrived home in the last three days. As many as 50 or 60 of them were young children whose parents were dead or missing, police officials said. .. ''You'd have to say we haven't seen this level of loss of life since our last war in 1814," he added, referring to a conflict between Sweden and Denmark."

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:13:59 GMT

Saddam planned the current insurgency in Iraq: "A trove of secret intelligence reports shows how Saddam Hussein planned the current insurgency in Iraq Long before the invasion that toppled his regime was even launched .. In the fall of 2002, several months before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein dispatched more than 1,000 security and intelligence officers to two military facilities near Baghdad where they underwent two months of guerrilla training, according to a secret U.S. military intelligence report. Anticipating his defeat, intelligence reports show, the Iraqi dictator began laying the foundation for an insurgency as Washington worked to convince the United Nations and allies around the world that Saddam had to go."

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 07:43:32 GMT

CIA fired me for not toeing Iraq line, says agent: An interesting case from Dec 10, will be interested to see if anything comes of it: "A senior CIA analyst who was once decorated for his work on weapons proliferation in the Middle East has accused the spy agency of ruining his career as punishment for his refusal to adhere to official pre-war "dogma" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. In a lawsuit filed in a US district court, the unnamed agent, described as a 22-year veteran of the agency's counter-proliferation department, accuses his former supervisors of demanding that he alter his intelligence reporting to conform to the views of CIA management in the run-up to the war on Iraq."

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 20:01:03 GMT

Power and Population in Asia: Interesting review of trends and issues. Here are some excerpts. "Although all of Asia/Eurasia is set to age markedly over the 2000-2025 period, most of the region will nonetheless remain relatively youthful. In South and Central Asia, .. even the most “elderly” country (Sri Lanka in 2025) is projected to have a somewhat younger profile than did Europe in the year 2000, and in 2025 South and Central Asia together will have a population younger than the Europe of 1950. .. The part of Asia/Eurasia that stands to age most rapidly, and most profoundly, is Eastern Asia — and here we enter uncharted territory. Between 2000 and 2025, East Asia’s median age is projected to jump by nine years, to just under 40. By that metric, East Asia in 2025 will be “grayer” than Europe today, where median age in 2000 was under 38. Throughout East Asia, many populations will be more elderly than any yet known, and some will be aging at velocities not yet recorded in national populations...

the most extreme and extraordinary instance of population aging will be witnessed in Japan. By 2025, in unpd medium variant calculations, Japan will have a median age of just over 50 .. almost every ninth Japanese will be 80 or older.. [Despite problems with government finances, and] while the population stagnation and decline that will almost surely attend Japan’s particular aging process stand to reduce the overall pace of aggregate economic growth, aging need not thwart the continuing improvement of per capita income — and augmentation of economic capacities — for Japan ..

Between 2000 and 2025 China’s median age is set to rise very substantially: from about 30 to around 39. According to unpd projections for 2025, in fact, China’s median age will be higher than America’s. .. [There is a problem:] To put the matter bluntly, Japan became rich before it became old; China will do things the other way around. When Japan had the same proportion of population 65 and older as does China today (2000), its level of per capita output was three times higher than China’s is now. .. [Consider the] national pension system: Japan’s may be financially vulnerable, but China’s is nonexistent. Government or enterprise-based retirement programs cover only about one-sixth of the contemporary Chinese work force — and nearly all of the pieces in this haphazard patchwork are amazingly unsound in actuarial terms...

By 2025, there will be nearly 300 million members of China’s 60-plus population, but, at the same time, the cohorts rising into that pool will be the same people who accounted for China’s sub-replacement fertility patterns in the early 1990s and thereafter. Absent a functioning nationwide pension program, unforgiving arithmetic suggests there may be something approaching a one-to-one ratio emerging between elderly parents and the children obliged to support them. Even worse, from the perspective of a Confucian culture, a sizable fraction — perhaps nearly one-fourth — of these older Chinese will have no living son on whom to rely for sustenance. ..

Second, and no less important, there is no particular reason to expect that older people in China will be able to make the same sort of contributions to economic life as their counterparts in Japan. In low-income economies, the daily demands of ordinary work are more arduous than in rich countries.. According to official Chinese statistics, nearly half of the country’s current labor force toils in the fields, and another fifth is employed in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, construction, or transport — occupations generally not favoring the frail. Even with continuing structural transformations, regular work in 2025 is sure to be much more strenuous in China than in Japan. Moreover, China’s older population may not be as hardy as peers from affluent societies — people likely to have been better fed, housed, and doctored than China’s elderly throughout the course of their lives...

[The result] will be a set of economic, social, and political constraints on Chinese development — and power augmentation — that have not as yet been fully appreciated in Beijing, much less overseas."

Other topics discussed include declines in health in Russia, AIDS in Russia and elsewhere, "son preference" in China and India, and comparisons to the US: "By the unpd’s medium variant projections, the United States is envisioned to grow from 285 million in 2000 to 358 million in 2025. In absolute terms, this would be by far the greatest increase projected for any industrialized society; in relative terms, this projected 26 percent increment would almost exactly match the proportional growth of the Asia/Eurasia region as a whole. Under these trajectories, the United States would remain the world’s third most populous country in 2025 [with a higher growth rate than] or virtually any country in East Asia.. [The causes are immigration and] about 2.0 births per woman, as against about 1.5 in Western Europe, roughly 1.4 in Eastern Europe, and about 1.3 in Japan...

Between 2000 and 2025, in these unpd projections, median age in the United States would rise by just two years (from 35.6 to 37.6). By 2025, the U.S. population would be more youthful, and aging more slowly, than that of China or any of today’s “tigers.” .. For the time being, however, it would appear that demographic trends may, in some limited but tangible measure, contribute to the calculus of American strategic preeminence in the Asia Pacific region, and indeed around the world."

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 22:38:12 GMT

When Islam Breaks Down by Theodore Dalrymple: Essay on the status and future of Islam from a British prison doctor.

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 08:22:43 GMT

China Invests Heavily In Sudan's Oil Industry: History of China's involvement in another oppressive regime, for oil. "Sudan is China's largest overseas oil project. China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have intensified Sudan's two-decade-old north-south civil war. A cease-fire is in effect and a peace agreement is expected to be signed by year-end. But the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region rages on, as government-backed Arab militias push African tribes off their land.

China in October signed a $70 billion oil deal with Iran, and the evolving ties between those two countries could complicate U.S. efforts to isolate Iran diplomatically or pressure it to give up its ambitions for nuclear weapons. China is also pursuing oil in Angola.

In the case of Sudan, Africa's largest country, China is in a lucrative partnership that delivers billions of dollars in investment, oil revenue and weapons -- as well as diplomatic protection -- to a government accused by the United States of genocide in Darfur and cited by human rights groups for systematically massacring civilians and chasing them off ancestral lands to clear oil-producing areas. .. China National Petroleum Corp. owns 40 percent -- the largest single share -- of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Co., a consortium that dominates Sudan's oil fields in partnership with the national energy company and firms from Malaysia and India. ..

"Oil from Sudan makes up one-tenth of all of China's imported oil," said Zhu Weilie, director of Middle East and North African Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, who has links with the Foreign Affairs Ministry. "If we lose this source, how can we find another market to replace it? China has to balance its interests." .. From its seat on the United Nations Security Council, China has been Sudan's chief diplomatic ally..

The pressure to find new sources of oil has grown as China has swelled into the world's second-largest consumer and as production at the largest of its domestic fields is declining. According to government statistics, China's imports have grown from about 6 percent of its oil needs a decade ago to roughly one-third today and are forecast to rise to rise to 60 percent by 2020. .."

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:12:39 GMT

BCFacts.org - The BC Government's Environmental Record: Interesting model of environmental information service for a single state (in this case provincial) government. Outbound syndication spreads the newsfeeds to partner sites, and inbound syndication supplies info from partners and volunteers.

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 16:42:25 GMT

NationMaster.com: Nifty statistics and mapping site for international comparisons (eg, total crimes per capita, or CO2 emissions per $ GDP).

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:51:48 GMT

Poll shows U.S. views on Muslim-Americans: A Cornell survey of Americans "found 44 percent favored at least some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way. The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim-Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising. ..

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim-Americans."

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 07:26:32 GMT

Dickey: Iraq, the training ground: "Iraq is now just the kind of place Al Qaeda needs to harden its recruits for terrorist actions around the world, just as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir, the Philippines and Chechnya have done before. “The blowback for this war has to be enormous,” says [Bruce Hoffman, author of the 1998 book “Inside Terrorism”]."

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:24:21 GMT

Foreign Affairs - Did North Korea Cheat? - Selig S. Harrison: Looks like another fine mess from Bush & Co. "Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in the summer of 2003 .. suggests that Kelly's charges were not justified by U.S. intelligence. Pointing to a CIA report submitted to Congress in November 2002, Pollack wrote that "the imprecision in the CIA analysis underscored the difficulties of estimating the extant capabilities and ultimate purposes of the North's enrichment program" and left it unclear "how complete and compelling the intelligence data may have been." According to Pollack, the CIA report indicated that North Korea had no operational enrichment facility to declare. ... The intelligence community believed that North Korea still [would have] confronted daunting obstacles had it decided to build an enriched uranium weapon, or even to acquire the production capabilities that might ultimately permit such an option. Most officials recognized that the path to a meaningful enrichment capability remained a distant and very uncertain possibility.

Despite its limited knowledge about the uranium program, the U.S. government "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes." The uranium issue "furnished powerful ammunition to render the Agreed Framework a dead letter"--something enormously appealing to hawks in the administration, who had opposed Clinton-era diplomacy toward North Korea as much too soft." It also was timed to influence South Korean and Japanese policy, which was warming to North Korea at the time.

"An examination of the November 2002 CIA report that set forth the basis for Kelly's confrontation confirms these charges of imprecision. Although the document alludes to "clear evidence" that North Korea had "recently" begun constructing a centrifuge facility (centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium), the CIA did not explain the nature of this evidence beyond mentioning, in general terms, that Pyongyang had acquired "centrifuge-related materials in large quantities." No specific evidence was presented to support the report's conclusion that North Korea was "constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more weapons per year when fully operational, which could be as soon as mid-decade." ..

since the report came out, no evidence to support it has been supplied to South Korea or Japan--or to China and Russia, the other countries participating in the ongoing six-party negotiations. (This assessment is based on off-the-record conversations with past and present government officials in these countries, including officials in South Korea and Japan who participated in the intelligence exchanges with the CIA that preceded the Kelly visit.) China alone has gone public on the issue. Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong told a New York Times reporter on June 7, 2004, "So far, the United States has not presented convincing evidence of the uranium program. We don't know whether it exists." ..

By scuttling the 1994 agreement on the basis of uncertain data that it presented with absolute certitude, and by insisting that North Korea "confess" to the existence of a uranium program before new negotiations on denuclearization can begin, the Bush administration has blocked action on the one present threat that North Korea is known to pose: the threat represented by its reprocessed plutonium, which could be used for nuclear weapons or transferred to third parties.

The administration's underlying mistake-in the case of the North Korean uranium mystery, as in Iraq-has been treating a worst-case scenario as revealed truth. In October 2004, when Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, was challenged to justify her government's mistaken assessment about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, she explained that "a policymaker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein." Similarly, General James Clapper, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, has said that "personally as opposed to institutionally, I was skeptical that they ever had a bomb. We didn't have smoking gun evidence either way. But you build a case for a range of possibilities. In a case like North Korea, you have to apply the most conservative approach, the worst-case scenario." The 1994 U.S. estimate (by the CIA and the DIA) that North Korea had "one or two" nuclear weapons at that time remains unchanged-although it has yet to be proved or disproved."

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 08:58:55 GMT

Why this brain flies on rat cunning: "a [rat's] brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer.. The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida. They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component. ..

The brain-in-a-dish is the idea of Thomas DeMarse, 37, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. His work has been praised as a significant insight into the brain by leading US academics and scientific journals. The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialised liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish. ..

In the most striking experiment, the brain was linked to the jet simulator. Manipulated by the electrodes and a desktop computer, it was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds. "When we first hooked them up, the plane 'crashed' all the time," Dr DeMarse said. "But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory."

Previously, scientists have been able to monitor the activity of only a few neurons at a time, but Dr DeMarse and his team can study how thousands of cells conduct calculations together. But it is still a long way from a human brain. "The goal is to study how cortical networks perform their neural computations. The implications are extremely important," Dr DeMarse said"

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:25:25 GMT

Cap Harnesses Human Thought to Move PC Cursor: Study published in the Proceedings of the NAS: "Scientists have developed a non-invasive brain-computer interface that enables a person to move a cursor across a computer screen just by thinking about it. .. Before the new finding, many researchers previously assumed that only invasive brain-computer interfaces, in which electrodes are surgically implanted into the brain, could control complex movements. ..

Of the four people who participated in the study, two had severe physical disabilities. The subjects wore the electrode caps, which analyzed electroencephalographic (EEG) activity (brain waves) recorded from their scalp. The electrodes, small metal disks about a quarter of an inch (three-fifths of a centimeter) wide, were placed over the sensory motor part of the brain.

At first, participants learned to use their thoughts to direct a cursor on a computer screen by imagining specific actions, from running to shooting baskets. As they became more comfortable with the technology, the subjects began to rely less on such imagery to direct the cursor. Eventually, the participants couldn't tell what they were thinking about to move the cursor; they simply moved it. ..

Each session lasted 24 minutes. It took participants two to three sessions to begin to acquire control of the cursor movement. After ten sessions, participants were able to hit the target on a computer screen about 80 percent of the time.

The two study participants with spinal cord injuries performed better than the uninjured participants, possibly reflecting greater motivation or injury-associated brain changes. ..

"The computer automatically adapts to the person using the system," Wolpaw said. "It is an interaction between two adaptive controllers—the system and the person using it." Wolpaw predicts future improvements of the non-invasive brain-computer interface will focus on three-dimensional movement. In the future, users may be able to operate a robotic arm that could pick things up, or they may be able to control a neural prosthesis in which electrodes implanted in a paralyzed limb may be stimulated to get the muscles to move."

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 16:35:09 GMT

Even the Economist has it on their cover: "How long can [the dollar] remain the world's most important reserve currency? ..

the privilege of being able to print the world's reserve currency, a privilege which is now at risk, allows America to borrow cheaply, and thus to spend much more than it earns, on far better terms than are available to others. Imagine you could write cheques that were accepted as payment but never cashed. That is what it amounts to. If you had been granted that ability, you might take care to hang on to it. America is taking no such care, and may come to regret it. ..

America's challenge is not just to reduce its current-account deficit to a level which foreigners are happy to finance by buying more dollar assets, but also to persuade existing foreign creditors to hang on to their vast stock of dollar assets, estimated at almost $11 trillion. A fall in the dollar sufficient to close the current-account deficit might destroy its safe-haven status. If the dollar falls by another 30%, as some predict, it would amount to the biggest default in history: not a conventional default on debt service, but default by stealth, wiping trillions off the value of foreigners' dollar assets.

The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price." Background online.

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:09:17 GMT

Bio interfaces to games: Wow. "Biofeedback has been around for a while... it was inevitable that it be married to video games. Another example of video games are getting more physical..." The promo clip for The Wild Divine is trippy new age, with endorsements by Deepak Chopra. More comments online, including links to games for correcting dsylexia and ADD.

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 07:43:40 GMT

NYT Magazine: The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders: Fascinating long article on how marketing has started to infiltrate word-of-mouth communication, with substantial discussion of what motivates the "agents" that carry the messages. Makes me wonder about recent intense polictical campaigns (Dean, born-agains), and blogging, how this might apply to politics in general. (My apologies for the length of the excerpts here, but there were many points I wanted to preserve).

"This idea -- the commercialization of chitchat -- resembles a scenario from a paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in which corporations have become so powerful that they can bribe whole armies of flunkies to infiltrate the family barbecue. ..

[BzzAgent] agents have essentially volunteered to create ''buzz'' about Al Fresco sausage and dozens of other products, from books to shoes to beer to perfume. BzzAgent currently has more than 60,000 volunteer agents in its network. Tremor, a word-of-mouth operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble has an astonishing 240,000 volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything from toothbrushes to TV shows. A spinoff, Tremor Moms, is in the works. ..

[BzzAgent had a rewards points system. But the agents did't use them much. They said] that there was nothing wrong with the rewards; it was just that the rewards weren't really the point. Even now, only about a quarter of the agents collect rewards, and hardly any take all they have earned. .. What Balter said he learned from his agents is that lots of people like to tell others what they are reading and what restaurant they've discovered and what gizmo they just bought. In his view, BzzAgent is simply harnessing, channeling and organizing that consumer enthusiasm. ..

Most teenagers have 25 or 30 names on their instant-messaging ''buddy list,'' whereas a Tremor member might have 150. Tremor recruits volunteers mostly through online advertisements and accepts only 10 or 15 percent of those who apply. The important thing, Knox said, is they are the right kind of kids -- the connected, influential trend-spreading kind. ..

[Agent] Onyenucheya gets free stuff from Tremor, and sometimes even a small check for taking surveys and participating in focus groups. .. This past July, she was invited to an advance viewing of two television shows, ''Lost'' and ''Complete Savages,'' at the Millennium screening room in downtown Manhattan. There were about 70 teenagers there, and pizza and sodas for everybody. Onyenucheya particularly loved ''Lost.'' ''When I came home,'' she said, ''I immediately told my five closest friends, like: 'Oh, my God, you just missed the greatest shows. I got to go down to the Millennium and saw a show called 'Lost' and it was so good, and we have to watch it when it comes out.' And I felt like I had the upper hand. Like, 'You don't know what I know.' '' ..

[By contrast, BzzAgent] agents are not screened. They are not chosen. They simply sign up. They are all kinds of people .. Maybe it's altruism, maybe it's a power trip, but influencing other people feels good. .. Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter but also, as Balter puts it, ''the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.'' ..

One reward Bollaert did collect from BzzAgent was, of all things, the William Gibson novel ''Pattern Recognition'' -- an actual paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in which corporations have become so powerful they can bribe flunkies to infiltrate your life and talk up products..

A loyal opinion leader -- someone who was seen by her social network as an expert on restaurants and who was also a Rock Bottom fan -- was pretty effective; if that restaurant expert was ambivalent about Rock Bottom, she was of little use. In contrast, it didn't really matter if the nonloyal agents knew much about restaurants. What mattered was that they told a lot of people (and presumably that they were enthusiastic). The implication is that it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about, as long as you are willing to talk a lot. ..

In the past, [Prof.] Schwartz notes, the challenge for the consumer was navigating a world of faulty, shoddy or unsafe products. That's not much of an issue anymore. Now, Schwartz told me, Consumer Reports might test 40 stoves, find that 38 of them are pretty good The ''Pretty Good'' Problem complicates our lives as consumers and makes it increasingly difficult for one of those 38 stoves to stand out. But it gives BzzAgent plenty of work...

economists [studies have] concluded that once something has been given to us, we value it more. .. Other studies have shown that we like things more simply by virtue of repeated or prolonged exposure to them. .. [This] might help explain why BzzAgents and other word-of-mouth volunteers get excited about whatever they are asked to push. Add to all of this the idea that they have been granted status as ''agents'' in an ''elite group'' that most of the world doesn't even know about, and have received a free sample of a brand-new product from a source that they trust, and they are almost certain to expend some kind of effort, unless the product is truly awful. [They] tend to see themselves as not being involved in marketing at all. Almost all of the BzzAgents I interviewed made this point. ..

Crucial to the BzzAgent system is the small team of young people in Boston who read and answer every single Bzz report. They offer encouragement, tips on how to improve word-of-mouth strategies. Every report is rated and every agent ranked according to a complicated formula ..

[One agent said] ''For me, it's being part of something big. I think it's such a big thing that's going to shape marketing. To actually be one of the people involved in shaping that is, to me, big.'' That made sense to me too. After all, there is one thing that is even more powerful than the upper hand, more seductive than persuading: believing."

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 05:14:29 GMT

Friedman: Fly Me to the Moon: "When did the Soviet Union collapse? When did reform take off in Iran? When did the Oslo peace process begin? When did economic reform become a hot topic in the Arab world? In the late 1980's and early 1990's. And what was also happening then? Oil prices were collapsing.

In November 1985, oil was $30 a barrel, recalled the noted oil economist Philip Verleger. By July of 1986, oil had fallen to $10 a barrel, and it did not climb back to $20 until April 1989. "Everyone thinks Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviets," said Mr. Verleger. "That is wrong. It was the collapse of their oil rents." It's no accident that the 1990's was the decade of falling oil prices and falling walls."

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 04:54:58 GMT

U.S. Health Chief, Stepping Down, Issues Warning: "Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced Friday that he was resigning, and he expressed grave concern about the threat of a global flu epidemic and the possibility of a terrorist attack on the nation's food supply.

"For the life of me," he said, "I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do." ..
Although the government has increased inspections of imported food, Mr. Thompson said he worried "every single night" about threats to the food supply.

"We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East and it would be easy to tamper with that," he said. He called for better technologies to detect contamination. ..

Mr. Thompson, freed from the constraints of administration policy, gave candid, unexpected answers to questions posed to him at a news conference at his department. He said he wished Congress had given him the power to negotiate with drug manufacturers to secure lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries. ..

Asked what worried him most, Mr. Thompson cited the threat of a human flu pandemic caused by mutations in a strain of avian influenza virus, known popularly as bird flu. "This is a really huge bomb that could adversely impact on the health care of the world," killing 30 million to 70 million people, he said."

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 18:00:10 GMT

How to make a jihadist: Good UPI coverage of a recent conference. "Many al-Qaida terrorists study abroad in Europe and the United States. They join the network to identify with a group and to feel at home in an unfamiliar place. They are not fighting because they are poor, but they are fighting for the poor people in their homes. "They are their poor brothers and sisters who they empathize with," Sageman said Wednesday at a daylong symposium put together by the New America Foundation.

Yosri Fouda, lead investigative reporter for Al Jazeera television network and author of "Masterminds of Terror," believe these highly educated men are a danger to society due to their lack of knowledge of Islam. "The highly educated know nothing about Islam," Fouda said. "That's what makes them so vulnerable. And in times of uncertainty, people become more extreme."

Sageman agreed. "These guys are the best and brightest in society, they speak three, four or five languages and they're computer savvy," Sageman said. "They go abroad to study, they become homesick. Expatriates look for people like themselves and where do they find them? Mosques." When they meet people like them, they form friendships and make cliques; these men are desperate to be a part of a group, no matter the price, Sageman said.

Sageman found that 68 percent of men who joined jihad -- holy war -- had close friends in jihad, or joined with friends. Twenty percent joined because they had fathers, brothers or cousins in jihad. Seventy percent went to jihad while living outside of their country. "

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:19:56 GMT

Fox creams CNN: "November was a very good month for Fox News Channel -- the channel's highest-rated month since the Iraq war in 2003. Fox News Channel [had] the top 11 shows in cable news, according to data released Wednesday by Nielsen Media Research. That's the first time it's ever happened in the News Corp.-owned network's eight-year history. .. "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel was the top show with an average 3 million viewers. Fox News Channel's primetime average was 2.1 million viewers, an increase of 70% compared to the same month a year ago. CNN averaged 982,000 viewers, up 15% and MSNBC was up 53% to 442,000 viewers. .. Fox News Channel averaged 1.2 million viewers in total [daytime shows], compared to CNN's 572,000 viewers. "

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:11:30 GMT

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens: Faith-based education. "Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday.. Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the
more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999 ..

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. .. Among the misconceptions cited :

A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.
One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion"

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 07:13:56 GMT

ArmsControlWonk.com: Ledeen's Iran Falsehoods: Useful info on the current state of Iran's nuclear inspections. Other interesting items on this blog.

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 07:59:43 GMT

Terror suspects' torture outsourced: A greater scale reported than previously acknowleged. " "extraordinary rendition," one of the earliest tools employed in the war against terror, has outraged human rights activists and former CIA agents, who say it violates the international convention on torture and amounts to "outsourcing" torture. "People are more or less openly admitting that there are certain practices that we would rather not do in the US, so why not let our allies do it?" said Ray McGovern, a former CIA operations officer who has frequently criticized the tactics used in the war on terror.

In recent weeks, the practice has become nearly synonymous with the white, 20-seat, private Gulfstream jet, numbered N379P and registered in Massachusetts. The Sunday Times of Britain reported two weeks ago that it had obtained a classified flight log of the plane that showed 300 flights from Washington, D.C., to 49 nations, including Libya, Jordan, and Uzbekistan -- three countries where the State Department has reported the use of torture. The story focused on the jet and Premier Executive Transport Services, the Massachusetts-registered company that owns it.

Sightings of the plane -- at refueling stops in Ireland and in Karachi, where it reportedly picked up another suspect -- have been published in newspapers across the globe and on the Internet. Records at the US Army Aeronautical Services Agency show the civil aircraft has a permit to land at US military bases worldwide."

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 22:49:25 GMT

Economic `Armageddon' predicted: "Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley .. sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ``we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.'' The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded. ..

To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings. Sustainable? Hardly. ..

Roach could not be reached for comment yesterday. A source who heard the presentation concluded that a ``spectacular wave of bankruptcies'' is possible. Smart people downtown agree with much of the analysis. It is undeniable that America is living in a ``debt bubble'' of record proportions. But they argue there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade."