mtanga

Archive: POLITICS

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With us or against us

Tariq Ramadan, a fellow at Oxford University in England, has been denied entry to the U.S. (where he had been invited to teach at Notre Dame). His story is chilling.

For more than two years now, the U.S. government has barred me from entering the United States to pursue an academic career. The reasons have changed over time, and have evolved from defamatory to absurd, but the effect has remained the same: I've been kept out.

First, I was told that I could not enter the country because I had endorsed terrorism and violated the USA Patriot Act. It took a lawsuit for the government eventually to abandon this baseless accusation. Later, I reapplied for a visa, twice, only to hear nothing for more than a year. Finally, just 10 days ago, after a federal judge forced the State Department to reconsider my application, U.S. authorities offered a new rationale for turning me away: Between 1998 and 2002, I had contributed small sums of money to a French charity supporting humanitarian work in the Palestinian territories.

I am increasingly convinced that the Bush administration has barred me for a much simpler reason: It doesn't care for my political views.

[snip]

Today, I live and work in London. From my posts at Oxford University and the Lokahi Foundation, I try to promote cultural understanding and to prevent radicalization within Muslim communities here. Along with many British citizens, I have criticized the country's new security laws and its support for the war in Iraq. Yet I have never been asked to remain silent as a condition to live or work here. I can express myself freely.

I fear that the United States has grown fearful of ideas. I have learned firsthand that the Bush administration reacts to its critics not by engaging them, but by stigmatizing and excluding them. Will foreign scholars be permitted to enter the United States only if they promise to mute their criticisms of U.S. policy?

Read Ramadan's full acount in The Washington Post

Subtle Torment

Joseph Margulies, a law professor at Northwestern University, reminds us of the genesis of Bush's current "aggressive interrogation" techniques:

In these uncertain times, it's worth recalling that the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of madmen is not new. Nearly 50 years before Sept. 11, 2001, the American public learned that a group of prisoners in military custody confessed to being part of an elaborate conspiracy to bomb civilian targets with bacteriological weapons.

The first prisoner to crack said the goal was "the mass annihilation of the civilian population." As often happens, his confession led to others, and before long, three dozen prisoners had coughed up page after page of chilling, meticulously detailed admissions.

But it was all a lie. Thirty-six American airmen, shot from the sky during the Korean War, falsely confessed to a vast plot to bomb civilian targets. How did this happen? With Congress having approved a "compromise" that gives the president authority to determine the meaning of the Geneva Conventions and redefines the War Crimes Act to protect CIA interrogators, we should revisit this all-but-forgotten moment in U.S. history.

Read the rest of Margulies' piece in The Washington Post

And in summary...

Senate Wins Fight To Lower Allowable Amperage Levels On Detainees' Testicles

WASHINGTON, DC—Led by a bipartisan group of senators critical of White House policy on suspected terrorists, the Senate passed a bill Thursday that prohibits interrogators from exceeding 100 amps per testicle when questioning detainees. "Even in times of war, it counterproductive and wrong to employ certain inhumane interrogation techniques, and using three-digit amperage levels on the testicles of captives constitutes torture," said Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has also supported reducing the size of attack dogs and the height of nude pyramids. "Using amperages of 99 and lower, with approved surge protectors on the jumper-cable clamps, are the hallmarks of a civilized society." The legislation did not address amperage restrictions on suspected terrorists' labia.

Thanks to – who else? – The Onion

The precise opposite

From an editorial by Harry Porter in today's Guardian (U.K.):

When Alexander the Great swept through Asia Minor in 337BC, he came to the impregnable mountain fortress of Termessos, not far from the modern-day Turkish city of Antalya. Termessos possessed a network of huge underground reservoirs and storerooms and, realising he would not bring the city to submission in a short time, Alexander ordered that the olive groves which provided Termessos with much of its income be levelled. It was an unusually spiteful act that was remembered for centuries afterwards.

I was reminded of the story when reading Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation, a vivid account of war and resistance in Iraq which is published by Verso this week. Cockburn describes a visit to Dhuluaya, a fruit-growing region 50 miles north of Baghdad, where, early on in the occupation, the American military cut down ancient date palms and orange and lemon trees as part of a collective punishment for farmers who had failed to inform them about guerrilla attacks. This vandalism will be remembered for generations because it was senseless and to the Iraqi mind powerfully symbolises the malice of the occupiers.

'At times,' Cockburn says of the period just after the invasion, 'it seemed as if the American military was determined to provoke an uprising.' Well, now they've got it, a ferocious war that in the last three months alone has cost 10,000 lives, most of them Iraqi. There seems no end to it and as Cockburn writes in his conclusion, instead of asserting America's position as the sole superpower, the occupation has amply demonstrated the limits of US power.

The precise opposite of the desired effect was also achieved in the idiotically named 'War on Terror'. By the admission of intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has galvanised terrorism. Sections of a US National Intelligence estimate that were declassified last week say the war has become the 'cause celebre for jihadist' and that 'jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests'. This is not the view of a few CIA desk officers, but the shared verdict of 16 branches of US intelligence.

Read Porter's full article here

A False Metaphor

George Soros is another who has been keenly observing the major blunders made by the Bush administration. In a recent article, he provided an excellent distillation of the major problem currently facing our country.

The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world.
Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued and, as our intelligence agencies have been telling President Bush, the terrorist threat has actually increased.

Unfortunately, the "war on terror" metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. Yet the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense. The "alternative treatment" of terrorist support has just been codified by Congress.

What makes the war on terror self-defeating?

Read Soros' full explanation at huffingtonpost.com

Hyperbole?

There was a time, early in Bush's reign, when I thought that things really couldn't get much worse. I've since learned not to take anything for granted – especially that. Among the non-mainstream commentators I have been reading during the past several years, there are a small number who have been well ahead of the curve. By that I mean that they were deeply pessimistic about the likely damage which would be caused by the Bush administration. I'm very, very sorry that they turned out to be so prescient. At the same time, I no longer look at their writing as hyperbolic; I take it very seriously.

One of those who falls into the above category is Chris Floyd. Floyd is an American journalist who has contributed to many well-known publications. One of the deep ironies of these surreal times is that Floyd is best known for having written the weekly Global Eye political column for The Moscow Times, and the St. Petersburg Times (a job which he lost very recently). In other words, one of the most honest, accurate reporters to have covered U.S. politics during the Bush presidency was writing mainly for Russian publications!

Here a taste of Floyd's interesting take on Bob Woodward's new book:

Bob Woodward has long been the voice of the American Establishment – or of certain quadrants of it, at any rate. When Richard Nixon's criminal depredations and mental instability had gone too far and it was decided to rein him in, former military intelligence officer Woodward was there as a safe pair of hands to receive the damning revelations of "Deep Throat" and help bring down the Nixon presidency. When the Establishment decided it was best to throw in with the Bush Faction's aggressive militarism after 9/11 – lots of big money to be made out of war and fear, and those tax cuts were just too sweet to pass up -- Woodward was there again, with a series of stories and books which, as Michiko Kakutani notes in the New York Times, "depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the 'vision thing' his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state."

And now, when it is clear that George W. Bush is – to put it plainly – a self-deluding addlepate in the late Nixon mode (without any of Nixon's considerable intelligence, of course), and that the orgy of war profiteering and corporate welfare he has thrown for the elite has reached a level of such murderous frenzy that it threatens to kill the whole golden goose of American power – or at least seriously damage the bottom line for years to come – the Establishment has turned to Woodward once again. And the old trouper has delivered.

[snip]

So parts of the American Establishment are at last making a move against the Bush Faction. Unlike the Nixon takedown, this could be too little, too late. For one thing, Nixon didn't have 9/11 to play with; nor did he have use of the Mighty Wurlitzer of the hard-right media juggernaut that serves Bush with Goebbelsian intensity and fidelity; nor did he have control of the Congress, with a party full of lockstep lickspittles and genuine moral and intellectual cretins willing to follow him over a cliff. In addition, Bush doesn't face constant riots in the streets against his foolishly and murderously prolonged pointless war; the American people are infinitely more docile, distracted and servile than they were in Nixon's day, as anyone who was alive then can vividly remember.

Nor did the Republicans in Nixon's time possess the extensive, high-tech vote-manipulation and vote-suppression systems that they have today, which have so far ensured that the Faction retains its overwhelming power – despite the overwhelming unpopularity of almost all of its core policies. In Nixon's day, Republican Establishment members had to worry about a backlash at the polls; this is still a danger for them, of course, but not nearly to the same extent. Today, it is possible – just – that an actual, massive landslide for the Democrats might result in a very narrow victory at the polls; it remains to be seen if the Bush Faction's vote-fixing machinery can plausibly handle anything beyond a fairly close losing vote for their side. But certainly nothing less than an historic landslide against the Republicans has a chance of bringing even a miniscule Democratic majority back into power.

Read Floyd's full piece at his blog

anatomy of a massacre

From Robert Fisk, writing for The Independent (U.K.):

In antiquity, Pliny wrote of the cliffs of Bayada. The chalk runs down to the Mediterranean in an almost Dover-like cascade of white rock, and the view from the top - just below the little Lebanese village of Chama'a - is breathtaking. To the south lies the United Nations headquarters and the Israeli frontier, to the north the city of Tyre, its long promentary, built by Alexander the Great, lunging out into the green-blue sea. A winding, poorly-made road runs down to the shore below Chama'a and for some reason - perhaps because he had caught sight of the Israeli warship off the coast - 58-year-old Ali Kemal Abdullah took a right turn above the Mediterranean on the morning of 15 July. In the open-topped pick-up behind him, Ali had packed 27 Lebanese refugees, most of them children. Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes.

The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves.

Read Fisk's full piece here

The Military Commissions Act

AKA the Torture and Detention act, passed the Senate yesterday. There has been plenty written about the bill already, with plenty more to come. Here's a decent summary of the problems with the bill, courtesy of Aziz Huq at Huffpost, and the (too late) NY Times editorial which was published the day of the vote. The most interesting perspective that I've come across is that of Jack Balkin at the excellent Balkanization blog:

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which the President will soon sign into law, was a response to the June decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Hamdan made three basic claims: (1) The President's military commissions proposal violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and was not authorized by the September 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force or the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005; (2) Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions -- including its absolute prohibition on all "cruel treatment and torture" of detainees -- applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda, and is binding on the President and his subordinates; and (3) Congress had not suspended judicial review at least with respect to some cases pending at the time of the Detainee Treatment Act.

In response, the Bush Administration sought and obtained a bill that (1) gave explicit authorization for a new form of military commissions not based on the UCMJ; (2) limited the practical enforceability (but not the legal status) of the Geneva Conventions; and (3) attempted to obliterate all judicial review of what happens to alien detainees except for reviews of the verdicts of military commission trials (and very limited review of a few final detention decisions.). This meant that some detainees who are never brought to trial would have no practical method of challenging their detention or their possible mistreatment even if it was in violation of federal law, the Constitution, or the Geneva Conventions, while others would have only a very truncated and delayed opportunity for review of detention decisions.

Viewed from one perspective, Hamdan was nothing more than a democracy-forcing decision that required the Administration to prove that Congress supported what he was doing. The President pushed through a bill that did just that. Viewed from another perspective, the Military Commissions Bill was nothing less than a smackdown of the Supreme Court; the Congress withdrew habeas review for aliens (and all other forms of review except for the appeals of military commissions and Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) mentioned above), limited the enforceability of Geneva, insulated previous and future practices from criminal sanction, and made the President the final interpretive word for non-grave breaches of Common Article 3.

It does indeed look like a smackdown, but there's more here than meets the eye.

Read JB's full piece here

"unlawful enemy combatants"

Marty Lederman, writing at the Balkinization blog, has been all over the Administration's the most recent, outrageous proposals.

Yesterday I explained that the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" (UEC) in the latest draft of the detainee bill was so ridiculously broad and open-ended that it could not possibly be intended to establish the authority of the Executive to militarily detain all persons so defined.

But it appears I underestimated the gall and recklessness of the Administration and Congress, because there seems to be a fairly widespread understanding that the definition would do just that. Even Human Rights First seems to agree that "unlawful enemy combatants" would be subject to indefinite detention.

[snip]

But the really breathtaking subsection is subsection (ii), which would provide that UEC is defined to include any person "who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."

Read literally, this means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to "hostilities" at all.

This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's not limited to aliens -- it covers U.S. citizens as well. It's not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it's not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.

Read Lederman's latest here

The War on Drugs: A Creative Strategy

Police in North Carolina have implemented an impressive new strategy in an effort to reduce the number of street drug peddlers. The program is particularly exciting because has been effective in getting young people off the streets (and presumably doing more constructive, legal things) without arresting them. The fascinating details can be found – of all places – in the Wall Street Journal:

For over three months, police investigated more than 20 dealers operating in this city's West End neighborhood, where crack cocaine was openly sold on the street and in houses. Police made dozens of undercover buys and videotaped many other drug purchases.

They also did something unusual: they determined the "influentials" in the dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers, mentors -- and cultivated relationships with them. When police felt they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did something even more striking: they refrained from arresting most of the suspected dealers.

In a counterintuitive approach, police here are trying to shut down entire drug markets, in part by giving nonviolent suspected drug dealers a second chance. Their strategy combines the "soft" pressure from families and community with the "hard" threat of aggressive, ready-to-go criminal cases. While critics say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early success and is being tried by other communities afflicted with overt drug markets and the violence they breed.

Overt drug markets -- street-corner dealing, drug houses, and the like -- constitute one of the worst scourges of poor communities. Such markets foment violent clashes between dealers, as well as robbery by addicts desperate for drug money. Property values suffer. Businesses and families move out -- or avoid moving in. Many residents who remain feel under siege. Police often rely on sweeps -- mass arrests of street-level dealers -- to eradicate drug-related crime. But those rarely provide more than short-term relief. In High Point, police believe that the combination of extensive investigation of the entire market and community involvement has helped solve the problem.

Read the full article here

Sensational, Scathing, and all too rare

Please watch Keith Olberman's latest commentary.

Insidious Media Complicity

Consider the most recent, striking example: Newsweek's cover in various geographical regions around the world:

Thanks to the Rising Hegemon

The truth begins to emerge, albeit slowly

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee convened a hearing on Iraq which included several retired military officers. Their testimony was straightforward, bracing, and highly critical of the Administration's prosecution of the war. Here are YouTube links for the testimony of:

Major General John Batiste

“I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq,”

Major General Paul Eaton

[Rumsfeld has been] “incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically. [He] and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making.”

Another who knows

The following piece was written by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean American writer and professor at Duke University, and author of "Death and the Maiden." It appeared in today's Washington Post.

It still haunts me, the first time -- it was in Chile, in October of 1973 -- that I met someone who had been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that had toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.

That is what stays with me -- that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.

It was his image, in fact, that swirled up from the past as I pondered the current political debate in the United States about the practicality of torture. Something in me must have needed to resurrect that victim, force my fellow citizens here to spend a few minutes with the eternal iciness that had settled into that man's heart and flesh, and demand that they take a good hard look at him before anyone dare maintain that, to save lives, it might be necessary to inflict unbearable pain on a fellow human being. Perhaps the optimist in me hoped that this damaged Argentine man could, all these decades later, help shatter the perverse innocence of contemporary Americans, just as he had burst the bubble of ignorance protecting the young Chilean I used to be, someone who back then had encountered torture mainly through books and movies and newspaper reports.

That is not, however, the only lesson that today's ruthless world can learn from that distant man condemned to shiver forever.

All those years ago, that torture victim kept moving his lips, trying to articulate an explanation, muttering the same words over and over. "It was a mistake," he repeated, and in the next few days I pieced together his sad and foolish tale. He was an Argentine revolutionary who had fled his homeland and, as soon as he had crossed the mountains into Chile, had begun to boast about what he would do to the military there if it staged a coup, about his expertise with arms of every sort, about his colossal stash of weapons. Bluster and braggadocio -- and every word of it false.

But how could he convince those men who were beating him, hooking his penis to electric wires and waterboarding him? How could he prove to them that he had been lying, prancing in front of his Chilean comrades, just trying to impress the ladies with his fraudulent insurgent persona?

Of course, he couldn't. He confessed to anything and everything they wanted to drag from his hoarse, howling throat; he invented accomplices and addresses and culprits; and then, when it became apparent that all this was imaginary, he was subjected to further ordeals.

There was no escape.

It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations, my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives -- Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? -- all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, that has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question -- Does torture work? -- when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress -- such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 -- are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be that hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?

What A resource

In spite of all of the difficult problems facing the world, I can't help but marvel at the power and, more importantly, the potential of the internet. Here's a small example of the sort of remarkable information which is available.

Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. Some of you may know him from his occasional appearances on The PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Lang has been extremely accurate in his (mostly) pessimistic assessments of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. He now also has a blog which includes links to articles, etc. Here is a recent post:

An Interesting Question

One of you sent me this interesting question which I offer for general discussion.

Pat Lang

----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Dear Colonel.

I've been enjoying your blog. I'm always happy when I find out where the grown-ups are in serious conversation. And my father, the Commander, taught me to take some talk very seriously.

I just came across a news story that says Hezbollah was able to read message traffic Isreal sent using the frequency hopping U.S.-designed communication system called the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wocode184896831sep18,0,3091818.story?coll=ny-worldnews-print

I don't know a lot about Signal Intel, just what I picked up third hand while my dad was flying with VQ-2 out of Rota Spain in the 60's.

However, if Hezbollah really has cracked these systems, it raises several questions.

Is it reasonable to assume that some black project in Syria or Iran was able to do this?

Is it more likely that some Syran or Iranian graduate of MIT or CalTec was able to put together electronic gear from Tiawan, China, Russia or the EU and get this capability? I don't know if this isn't more frightening than the above or the next option.

Or is it more likely that someone among the major players sold the top of the line to Iran so it could be tested against the best of the last remaining super power. (I note that France or Russia was supposed to have jammers to protect sites from our GPS guided bombs. They sold them to Iraq, but they didn't work as advertised.)

I wonder if this is something you'd like to send up for your readers to comment on." MM

Lang simply opened the question up for discussion, and, among other interesting responses, here is a particularly impressive one:

Speaking as a Ph.D. EECS Geek (more CS than EE overall, but still some EE and DSP by osmosis) and a computer security professional.

I suspect a lot was actually two sources:

Cellphones and LOCATION tracking.

Cellphones are obvious. ALthough the Israelis weren't supposed to be using cellphones for anything secure, even unsecure information, such as a call home to a loved one, would be a huge trove of information. Given how much else was a bit of a fiasco on the Israeli army's part, I'd worry about signal discipline.

THe other is simply location tracking. Although its hard to key in on a spread spectrum signal, its actually really easy to triangulate.

You have a bunch of receivers, with high precision, synchronized clocks. You record when you get pulses of communication, both start and end, on various frequencies. You can even have reference pulses sent out from known locations, if the clocks are too drifty.

Then you tie all the data together and the time of flight (Light is actually SLOW by the standards of modern electronics, 3 microseconds/kilometer, in the days when electronic clocks are in nanoseconds), and now you can track where the signal came from.

Just knowing and trakcing where all the transmitters ARE gives a huge wealth of information. Add in the types of transmitters and an enemy commander can see a wealth of information.

Such technology is effectively implementation: someone who's well educated (MS EE, signal processing) could design and implement such a system, be they in Taiwan, China, India, Iran, or the USA.

Breaking the crypto, on the other hand, would be a BIG deal. IF that happened, it was probably a case of bungled key management combined with one or more captured radios. Or relatively obsolete radios (64 bit keys are brute-forceable, 128 bit AES keys? forgetaboutit)

Oh, Will, its not that stealth fighters interfear with radio transmitters, its that US stealth is based on scattering and some absorbtion, not transparency (eg, Piper cub).

As a result, the signals are never bounced BACK at a radar. But if you have dozens or hundreds of transmitters, and a bunch of receivers, you can see the SCATTERED radio energy off the stealth aircraft. THis is known as "Multipath Radar"

This poses two BIG problems to US air doctrine: not only does it break stealth, but it also breaks anti-radiation missile based strategies, as the transmitters are cheap and pletniful (the transmitters basically just have to broadcast an identity signal and be at known locations) and disposable, while the receivers, the complex parts, are radio-silent.

The USAF is quiet in public about multipath radar, but I'm willing to bet its considered a big concern in private.

Colonel, if you have further questions, I can attempt to elaborate in more detail.

Posted by: Nicholas Weaver | 20 September 2006 at 10:24 AM

Setting aside the obvious questions raised (re: the effectiveness of the wildly expensive stealth fighters), imagine how difficult it would have been to find such information without the 'net. Truly amazing.

From One who Knows

As the echos of the Administration's rationalizations reverberate, it's probably a good idea to listen to the voice of one who knows first hand what torture is all about.

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain's amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Vladimir Bukovsky spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities. Read his full editorial in the Washington Post

Civil War in Iraq? Nah.

Unless – unlike the criminals in the Bush administration – you happen to think that SEVEN THOUSAND civilian deaths during the past two months might indicate something of the sort. Oh, and here's a little gem:

The US military had initially claimed a dramatic drop in the Iraqi death toll for August, but the estimate was revised sharply upwards after it revealed that it had inexplicably left out figures for people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets and other mass attacks.

Read the awful details in The Guardian (U.K.)

More on the Torture Bill

Marty Lederman has identified, and explores the three most troubling aspects of the Senate "compromise" on torture. You can – and should – read Lederman's insights

The following is taken from a post by Tristero on Digby's blog.

So tell me, my fellow Americans:

How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture?

How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers?

How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to the American fascists in charge of this country's legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?

And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn't torture?

I'll tell you how I feel. I am outraged and ashamed.

Kudos to Digby for calling this exactly right from the start. Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permittted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina. What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget?

Amen.

Exactly What sort of progress?

For the first time ever, the Forbes 400 list of the world's richest people only includes billionares. So how does the ignoramus who compiled and edited the list describe it? Here's how:

"It is a really big deal that it's all billionaires," said Forbes associate editor Matthew Miller, who edited the list and led the team that spent a year compiling it. "It shows economic growth and, as this magazine is a fan of capitalism, it shows progress."

Yes, that's a very accurate way to gauge economic progress, to which I'm sure all of the working-class people in the U.S. will attest.

Read the full article in the Washington Post

The Senate Compromise

I am so enraged by this, I can barely see straight. Helpfully, Chris Floyd has contributed a scathing summary of the situation:

Let's have Bill Frist -- surely one of the most pathetic creatures ever inflicted on the U.S. Senate and the long-suffering people of Tennessee -- explain exactly what this great "agreement" means:

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the agreement had two key points. “Classified information will not be shared with the terrorists” tried before the tribunals, he said. And “the very important program of interrogation continues.”

There you have it. People snatched off the street -- or sold to spies by snitches and scamsters -- can be tried, in military tribunals, without seeing the evidence against them; and Bush's "program of interrogation continues."

Let's be very clear on the latter point. What Bush has been talking about and protesting against were efforts to ensure that CIA interrogators could not torture suspects. Because of course they could continue to use ordinary methods of interrogation -- which experts uniformly agree produce better intelligence -- just as they have always been able to. When Bush and Tennessee cat-torturer talk about the "program of interrogation" continuing, they mean allowing the CIA to torture captives by various methods without being charged with war crimes and felony violations of American law. That is precisely what they are talking about, and nothing else. But you won't see it put that way on the pages of our most august journalist institutions nor on the broadcasts of our world-renowned network news shows.

And let us make one other point -- and in a most impolitic way, for the truth is often an impolitic commodity: John McCain is a goddamned liar. Yes, he himself suffered torture, yes he came through it, yes, we all admire his fortitude during that ordeal in his youth: but his record in later life, in politics, is that of a moral coward with good PR skills. (Not that it takes much skill to wow the poltroons who squat on the commanding heights of the corporate media world today.) And today, he has opened his mouth and emitted a damnable lie, to wit: "the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.”

This is an untrue statement, analogous to saying the moon is located in his rectum or that he can bite through pig iron with his bare teeth. Every step the Bush gang has taken in this pro-torture, don't-prosecute-us campaign is designed to weaken the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions, which have been adopted into American law by Congress -- in bills sponsored and championed by Republicans -- are crystal clear on torture. There is no need to "preserve" their integrity with new legislation; there is nothing wrong with the Conventions that need to be "fixed" -- unless, of course, you wish to use interrogation techniques that any sentient human being would recognize as torture. In that case, of course you have to "fix" the Conventions by gutting their integrity, letter and spirit.

Read Chris' full piece at his website, Empire Burlesque

Tales of Government corruption: The Iron Triangle

Earlier this year, the IDA had been asked by the Pentagon to assess the viability and potential cost of a three-year, $60-plus billion Multi-Year Procurement (MYP) of F-22 jets. The details here are complicated, but in essence the MYP proposed as an amendment to the Senate's 2007 Defense Authorization bill by Georgia's Saxby Chambliss would lock the government into a bulk purchase of three years' worth of F-22s, instead of the traditional yearly individual purchases.

Blair's IDA did as ordered, ultimately issuing a report showing that the MYP, by allowing suppliers to sell to the government at reduced bulk rates, would save the government a quarter of a billion dollars. This contradicted the findings of both the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, which blasted the procurement as an indefensibly stupid waste of money, but the IDA's "congressionally mandated independent study" (as Chambliss called it) was the one legislators chose to listen to.

Chambliss's amendment passed 70-28, with wide bipartisan support. Most all of the Senators who voted for the bill, including Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Chuck Schumer and Daniel Inouye, had received generous campaign contributions from Lockheed-Martin, the maker of the F-22, and from subcontractors like Pratt and Whitney.

Moreover, it subsequently came out that Blair himself sat on the board of EDO, a subcontractor on the F-22 project. EDO makes a missile launching system for the plane. Though such conflicts of interest are not barred by the Pentagon, Blair last week resigned voluntarily -- quietly, with only the Post noticing, at a time when Katie Couric was neatly innovating the network news concept by giving platform-impoverished radio jock Rush Limbaugh a guest slot on her news show. Blair's resignation was a de facto admission that a key study supporting one of the largest defense procurements in history was seriously compromised, even beyond the built-in conflict of interest inherent in a congress heavily funded by defense contractors.

The ongoing bureaucratic drama surrounding procurement for this project is a kind of fairy tale for the system of legalized corruption in this country, in which taxpayer money is basically stolen and shot into space by an open conspiracy of legislators, defense contractors and Pentagon officials, colloquially known as the "Iron Triangle." The F-22 project is particularly offensive since its cost -- $65 billion -- mirrors very closely the $50 billion in "emergency" cuts to social programs congress made last year, ostensibly to help pay for Katrina reconstruction.

Read the full, sickening, and (need I add?) underreported story by Matt Taibbi

The lethal residue of Israel's Lebanese incursion

The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.

In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. "I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him," said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.

At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.

Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did there was crazy and monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.

Read the full report from Patrick Cockburn in The Independent (U.K.)

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