Speaking of intelligence

Updated The Christian Science Monitor's valuable Daily Update for June 15 says that

reform, major reform, of the CIA is in the air.

The question isn't whether there will be changes at the premier US spy agency, but whether they will be as extensive as the Church Committee reforms of 1975 the last great overhaul of the agency.

Two reports expected to be sharply critical of the agency are due shortly; coming in the wake of the "incidents of terrorism" debacle, the spooks are braced for the worst.

The first shot will be the long-delayed report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is expected to savage the CIA's performance on prewar intelligence on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. That should be followed next month by the 9/11 Commission's report, which is also expected to excoriate the folks at Langley. Some have even suggested that George Tentative resigned in order to get out while the getting was good so that he could claim boilerplate "personal reasons" rather than it being obvious he was driven out for screwups.

I can't help but wonder, though, if the White House is not secretly delighted over this turn of events, where all the blame for prewar failures is to be laid on the backs of the CIA.

But remember, it wasn't the CIA that was listening to Ahmed Chalabi's fairy tales, it was the White House, it was Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the so-called Office of Special Plans they set up specifically to do an end run around the intelligence community. In fact, the CIA didn't trust Chalabi.

It wasn't the CIA that was peddling bogus stories about yellow cake uranium going from Nigeria to Iraq, it was the White House, even though it likely knew the story was false. In fact, Tenet was responsible for getting the reference removed from one of Bushleague's speeches.

It was, however, the CIA that was continually pressured to get in line, to get with the program, to shade it's findings to fit White House propaganda, to turn "maybe" and "possibly" into "assuredly" and "certainly," to ignore its own findings that the information was unreliable. The pressure included visits by Cheney to CIA headquarters, something one agent called "unprecedented."

Yet now we are, it seems, to be told that actually it was all the fault of the CIA's stupidity and the White House gang was merely the innocent victim of its incompetence.

All this, I'm sure, widened the grins and deepened the relieved sighs across GOPperland that began when the 9/11 Commission indicated that in the spirit of bipartisanship - which really meant in the reality of partisanship - it was not going to criticize individuals in its report, it was going to focus on that old dodge, "systematic failures." Blame spread to "system," to "failures of communication," to "structural deficiencies," that let actual people off the hook.

It might at first sight seem odd that this would be a relief; after all, there is certainly enough blame to go around and Clinton administration people would come in for their share of - perhaps even the majority of - lashings, which should delight the rightists.

But just remember: The Clinton administration is not running for office right now. The Bush crew is. And that is a very real difference.

Footnote, Makes You Wonder Div.: One of the stories the Daily Update links to is an interview in the June 14 Salon with intelligence expert Thomas Powers.

Powers suggests there is a hidden but major struggle going on between the White House and Pentagon on the one hand and the CIA on the other that has affected things in Iraq. He notes that Ahmed Chalabi was the fair-haired boy of the war hawks, some of who, for example Richard Perle, still insist what we should have done was turn Iraq over to him immediately. He was the favorite of the Pentagon/White House team. His star declined as it developed that contrary to his assertions, he had no base of support within Iraq, but still he was a prominent member of the Iraqi Governing Council, his group still receiving $340,000 a month in funding from the DOD.

But then came the raid on his office, the accusations of spying for Iran, the resulting undoing of his public position - which were undertaken by the CIA. Chalabi and his supporters have even been excluded from the interim government, one that at one time he expected to head.

And who now occupies the office of prime minister, the most powerful office in the interim government? Why, Iyad Allawi - the CIA's boy, who they turned to when they soured on Chalabi.

So was this a sort of backhanded coup by the CIA against the DOD and White House? Was it payback for their manipulation of Tenet and agency analyses to advance their agenda? Does it show a deep and potentially dangerous divide? I don't know. But it does make for interesting speculation and in the context of persistent reports of bad blood between the two sides generated by the Bushites insistence that facts be bent to fit perceptions, it frankly make sense that there was more to this than what meets the proverbial eye.

Oh, and shed no tears for Chalabi. He's busily trying to build a new power base.

As if we didn't know

The lead is important, but in fact it understates what is in the body of the story. From AP for Wednesday:

Washington - Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States.

But, in fact, the text of the article goes well beyond just 9/11.

The Iraq connection long suggested by administration officials gained no currency in the report.

"Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded," the report said. "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred" after bin Laden moved his operations to Afghanistan in 1996, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," it said.

"Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq," the report said.

In other words, they may have occasionally talked to each other but they did not work together. The whole "al-Qaeda-Saddam link" business was a lie. Not that we didn't already know it but this makes it, well, "official."

This comes just two days after The Big Dick Cheney repeated the lie.

"He was a patron of terrorism," Cheney said of Hussein during a speech before The James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Florida. "He had long established ties with al Qaeda."

But of course he didn't, and the White House knew it. (Tellingly, AP notes that Cheney "offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaida.") This wasn't a case of misinterpreting intelligence, this wasn't even a case of cherry-picking intelligence. This was a case of outright whoppers, murderous lies whose effects are still being seen every day in the street and roads of Iraq.

They are a disgrace to their offices. The bunch of them.

Footnote: Actually, there's more. According to the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, there was someone who was cozy with bin Laden: our great ally in the war against terrorism, Pakistan.

The report also said that Pakistan broke with Afghanistan's Taliban regime only after September 11, even though it knew the Taliban was hiding bin Laden.

"The Taliban's ability to provide bin Laden a haven in the face of international pressure and UN sanctions was significantly facilitated by Pakistani support," the report said.

"Pakistan benefited from the Taliban-al-Qaeda relationship, as bin Laden's camps trained and equipped fighters for Pakistan's ongoing struggle with India over Kashmir."

That tidbit doesn't seem to have made it into a lot of domestic coverage.

Oh my gosh, good news out of the Senate!

Updated On a voice vote, the Senate today added an amendment to a defense spending bill

to make clear that the United States will not use torture against detainees. ...

The measure says the United States "shall not engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment ... a standard that is embodied in the U.S. Constitution and in numerous international agreements which the United States has ratified."

The amendment also would require the secretary of defense to issue guidelines to ensure troops comply with the standards and report to Congress on any suspected violations.

The measure, apparently in response to recent releases of memos indicating that the WHS* were developing legal cases to justify torture, had bipartisan sponsorship.

Unfortunately, there is no companion provision in the House version, so it may disappear in conference, but still, standing as a rejection of the "logic" of those memoranda, it was a good thing to see.

Thanks to TalkLeft for the tip.

Footnote: In other actions indicating that even the GOPpers are getting fed up with Shrub, the Senate

voted 97-0 to extend use of two U.S. criminal statutes overseas, a measured aimed at better prosecuting companies that overcharge or use other fraudulent schemes to profit unduly from war contracts. Senators rejected 52-46 a measure that would have made war profiteering a new federal crime subject to up to 20 years in prison.

While that last vote was a loss by my lights, the margin was frankly considerably closer that I expected.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Update: Oh my, I have to take a lot of my surprise back. According to Billmon at the Whiskey Bar, quoting Wednesday's Washington Post,

[p]assage of the proposal by voice vote came after Republicans, facing defeat on the measure, agreed to raise no objections and offer no alternatives if the vote was taken by voice instead of putting all senators on record with a roll call, according to Democratic sources.

In other words, it passed by voice vote without objection because at least some Repuglicans, knowing they would lose, didn't want anyone to know they were actually against rejecting torture. Yuck.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is fifty?

JEOPARDY!
Stars on Flags for $600

To guess this number of stars on the flag of Somalia, close your eyes and think of Texas.

DOJball

It has been argued - and I do argue - that the Department of Justice under John Burntfarm is perhaps the most politicized agency in surely the most politicized US administration of modern times if not our whole history. Consider, for the latest example, the sharp questions that the folks at LiberalOasis raise about the nature and timing of the announcement of the indictment against Somali immigrant Nuradin Abdi on a charge of providing material support to terrorists.

Why, for example, was the press conference announcing the indictment held on Monday when the charges were handed up by the Grand Jury the previous Thursday if not to avoid interfering with the adulatory coverage of Reagan's funeral?

And why the refusal to offer specifics of the alleged plot? Could it be that those details would make it seem somehow less threatening? LO quotes ABCNews as saying

[i]nvestigators believe the alleged plot to blow up a Columbus shopping mall was in the earliest stages.

They said no bomb-making materials have been found, and admit they don't have evidence to prove Abdi went for training in Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, AP says that prosecutors say no specific mall was targeted and according to the New York Times, law enforcement officials

said the plot was still under investigation, but they cautioned that it appeared not to have advanced beyond the discussion stage. The officials expressed doubt that Mr. Abdi had the financial, organizational or technical skills to carry out an attack.

As a result, LiberalOasis wonders aloud if the intent is "fearmongering by swing state."

Certainly, the current DOJ has more than once had politics drive policy. Paul Krugman has more on this in his June 15 column, including how the DOJ

invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. [Sibel] Edmonds from providing evidence [to the 9/11 Commission]. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to

in testimony before Congress in 2002, when she described serious deficiencies in the FBI's counterintelligence operations. (Senator Charles Grassley had said people within the FBI had corroborated Edmonds' testimony.)

For my part, I was reminded of the case of William Krar, who was arrested in December along with his common-law wife in Tyler, Texas. They were in possession of a completed cyanide bomb capable of killing everyone in a large office building, plus about 100 more conventional explosives, bomb components, and chemical agents, along with evidence this was all part of a well-developed plot. But when the arrests came, no big deal was made about it to the media even though it was apparently the biggest domestic terrorism investigation since Oklahoma City. John Cinderfarm appeared at no press conferences, there were no screaming headlines, no push to make it news. There were press releases, yes, but it was treated almost as routine news. As was noted at the time, if you weren't from east Texas you likely knew nothing about it.

Why the difference? What other than politics, the politics of fear and xenophobia, could drive the DOJ to make Abdi's "discussions" a headline across the country while Klar's ready-to-go cyanide bomb remained in the shadows?

Now, if the Ohio case was an example of foiling a real terror plot, good, excellent, hooray for the investigators, and indeed would provide further proof of an assertion I made less than four months after 9/11:

Patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined.

But then we're back to the timing. If you've got Abdi nailed, if you know what's going down, why not wait a while, let it develop, get more information on him, his co-conspirators, see where they're getting their supplies, see what contacts they make, why not get more information, which is what you're always claiming you don't have enough of, before you make your move? What was the rush to grab someone for a "plot" that was just talk and for which he lacked the ability? Was it indeed just because they figured Bush needed some "good news" in the form of an arrest, especially in the wake of the terrorism report debacle?

Back on January 11, writing about the Klar case, I noted that when challenged about the differing PR treatments given such as Klar versus, for example, Jose Padilla, the DOJ will insist that it is not ignoring domestic terrorism.

But that misses the point. I have no trouble believing that the law enforcement professionals in the DOJ take their jobs seriously and are not ignoring domestic terrorism. Every case of supposed laxity in tracking our native-born wackos can be matched by a slip-up in keeping tabs on some foreign plotter. I realize that's a kind of backhanded defense, saying they've been equally inefficient in both areas, but it does say they haven't been focusing on one to the exclusion of the other.

But again, that's not the point. The point is the political purposes to which the cases are put by the top layers of the department, the shouting about one and the whispering about the other, the nativist and racist fears exploited to advance an agenda. That's the issue that cases such as this raise, that's the issue that we have to face.

And even Nuradin Abdi being guilty as charged does not change that.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who was Alexander Graham Bell?

JEOPARDY!
Stars on Flags for $200

It's the greatest number of stars found on a national flag.

Flagging down a pledge

When I first mentioned the Pledge of Allegiance case back on March 24, I said I expected the Supreme Court to overrule the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that found the phrase "under God" an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

However, noting that Antonin Scalia had recused himself, thereby raising the possibility of a 4-4 tie, I added that

if there is any chance of that, they have the easy out of a lack of legal standing on [plaintiff Michael] Newdow's part: He never actually adopted the girl so there is a serious and legitimate legal question of his right to sue on her behalf.

As it turns out, the Court took exactly that tack in what amounted to a "no decision" decision.

Washington (CNN, June 14) - The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a California father could not challenge the Pledge of Allegiance, a decision that sidestepped the broader question of the separation of church and state.

The 8-0 ruling by the high court reversed a lower-court decision that teacher-led recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional.

Newdow had sued the school district where his 10-year old daughter attended class, saying the inclusion of the phrase "under God" was an infringement on her First Amendment freedoms because having it recited every day in the classroom gave an imprimatur to a religious belief. The 9th Circuit agreed, prompting the Supreme Court review. But instead of actually reviewing the issue, the Court, likely terrified of the implications, punted.

What were those implications? I think - I'm not sure, but I think - it was George Will called Newdow "annoying" and "foolish," a "pest," and then said he had one thing going for him: "He's right."

And of course he was right. The original pledge, written in 1892 by a Baptist minister, had no reference to God. When Congress adopted it in 1942 as a patriotic tribute, it was without any reference to God. In fact, the phrase "under God" was not inserted into the Pledge until 1954, when Congress did it for the avowed purpose of differentiating us from "godless Communism." It was specifically intended to declare a belief in God as part of our national ethos.

Which is what made it so hilarious to see the Pledge's defenders falling all over themselves to insist that an explicit reference to God had no connection to religion, oh no, no way, it never even crossed our minds, God forbid - er, heaven forb - er, well, it just didn't. No, it's just a "civic exercise," a "platitude," one actually called it, merely an "official acknowledgment of our nation's religious heritage," Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued. Their confidence in their arguments can perhaps be seen in the fact that they gave equal weight to Newdow's questionable standing: It would seem to me that if these vociferous defenders of the current wording were so sure of the legal and Constitutional merits of their position, they would have much preferred to push the issue to its conclusion and get a definitive ruling. It may well have been their undoubted awareness that their arguments stand in direct contradiction to the history and legislative history of the Pledge that that moved them instead to make broad gestures toward an exit - and the Court's knowledge of that same fact that moved the Justices to use it.

Fulfilling his role

Once again, Colin Powerless has been trotted out to give the bad news. From the International Herald Tribune for June 14:

After a weekend of violence in both Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Sunday that Iraqis could face a long, bloody summer and that for Saudi Arabia, "clearly this is a dangerous time"....

But Powell added that failure, in the form of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal under pressure, "is not an option for us."

Okay, how about a non-precipitous withdrawal? As in, to quote myself, "set the damn date and get the hell out?" And shouldn't it be the Iraqis' options, not ours, that decide? That may, in fact, develop, as interim president Ghazi al-Yawar "indicated that he planned to mark respectful differences from the U.S.-led occupying forces" including that

he expected the bulk of U.S. forces to leave his country within six to 12 months — sooner than the 18 months for which the UN resolution provides a mandate.

That would be more impressive if the office of president were not mostly ceremonial - that is, a figurehead - but still it means there is a clear desire even in the US-approved government for at least a relatively rapid withdrawal of foreign forces. Our military presence there is not popular (I never did see any pictures of those rose petals that were supposed to be lining the streets upon our arrival.) and even those who accept it for the time being regard it as a necessary evil to be dispensed with as soon as possible.

The question is, as it has always been, what then?

Continuing and intensifying violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Pakistan show that ancient rifts have not healed and frankly I find no reason to think they are any more healed in Iraq, especially since, as I've noted often enough before, there seems to be an equation among Shiites there between democracy and majority control - not just rule, control. That's a prospect that can hardly sit lightly on the shoulders of the Sunnis or the Kurds.

Speaking of that, the issue of the Kurds remains on the stove, perhaps not boiling but certainly simmering. As negotiations on the UN Security Council resolution continued, Kurdish leaders threatened to quit the government if some reference to Kurdish autonomy was not part of the final text.

Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan made the threat in a publicly-released letter to President Bush,

said VOA news on June 7. An article from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which first revealed the letter on June 6, says

"We were ... bitterly disappointed when your special representative advised us that a Kurd could be neither Prime Minister nor President of Iraq," Barzani and Talabani told the US president. "We were told that these positions must go to a Shiite Arab and Sunni Arab respectively."

To the Kurds, there is not a three-way division in Iraq, but a two-way: Sunnis and Shiites (i.e., Arabs) on the one hand, and Kurds on the other. To be shut out of both top posts seemed to them a denigration of their role in a future Iraq.

Eight deputy and cabinet posts in the new government did go to Kurds - including the post of foreign minister - but they are of little importance, many say, since the positions will be under the direct authority of the president and prime minister.

"The Kurds have been turned into second class citizens or even less," said Aram Omer, 38, a professor in the College of Law at the University of Sulaimaniyah.

(That again from IWPR, for June 8.) The sentiment was echoed in Barzani's and Talabani's letter, in which they complained that

"it is rare for the US government or the CPA even to refer to Kurdistan or the Kurdish people" in official statements.

This was happening even as Kurdish nationalism is growing with moves in places like Kirkuk to teach classes using Kurdish instead of Arabic and indeed, to teach people to read and write Kurdish, an opportunity many never had because of suppression of Kurdish culture under Saddam.

And it was happening even as, contrary to what was reported earlier,

[t]he Kurdish armed militia, the peshmerga, has denied any agreement with Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to disband its formations and join them with the Iraqi army. An official source in the general leadership of the peshmerga said they have had no negotiations on this issue with the new government.

That according to the daily paper of the Al-Mashriq Institution for Media and Cultural Investments in Baghdad, as reported by the Iraqi Press Monitor for June 10.

Ultimately, no specific reference to Kurds or Kurdish rights was in the resolution, leading Kurdish members of the government to say they would quit if their leaders told them to. Fortunately, it didn't come to that, as Allawi declared on Friday that he had "sorted out" the dispute. He gave no details, but my suspicion is that he convinced Kurdish leaders to give things a chance based on the resolution's reference to "federalism" and the injunction to the interim government not to undertake any actions that would affect Iraq's future beyond it's term - which undoing the provisional law that allows for Kurdish autonomy would certainly seem to do.

Still, what that means, if I'm right, is that the issue has been postponed, not resolved. Old enmities between Sunnis and Shiites, old suspicions of Arabs by Kurds, have not disappeared, they have only been pushed aside in the face of a common enemy. John Morley said "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him." It can equally be said that you have not resolved a conflict by suppressing it.

A long, hot, summer indeed. And a long winter to follow.

Footnote One: It was also reported by the Tribune that

[t]he Bush administration now gives the Saudi government higher marks than before for working hard to fight terrorism. Powell said that the Saudis were treating the threat "with utmost seriousness."

Higher marks? The amount of support for terrorism, both financial and ideological, that could be traced to the Saudis was astonishing. But instead of treating them the way we treated poor, unimportant countries such as Afghanistan, we (i.e., White House officials) coddled them, made excuses for them, covered for them, even offered them special protection in the wake of 9/11 (such as that flight to pick up members of the royal family in the US at a time the skies were supposedly locked down, a flight that until now the government denied took place). In fact, it appears the Saudi ambassador knew of the decision to attack Iraq even before Secretary of State Powerless did.

Higher marks? Damn straight; it's not hard to get higher than zero.

Footnote Two: Speaking of good old Colin, have you noticed how every time there's a dirty deed to be done or a blunder to be admitted, he's the one sent out to do it? He's the one who has to admit to a "long, hot, summer" coming. He's the one who had to announce that the report on terrorist incidents was seriously screwed up, even though most of the info came from the CIA. (Yes, I know Tenet is out but there is still an acting director. Why didn't he make the announcement?) When the US wanted to convince Arabs that Bushleague's agreement with Ariel Sharon didn't mean what it obviously did, he got the job. He's the one who had to admit that claims about Iraqi "chemical weapons trailers" were bogus.

And he's the one that got to make the claims in the first place. Recall the story of him getting the draft of his presentation to the Security Council in the spring of 2003 and throwing it across the room, saying "This is bullshit. I'm not going to read this." First, it means that the intended speech, amazingly, was even worse than what we got and was, uh, "improved" only because Powell raised a stink. Note too, however, that it means that Powell did not draft the speech - he was handed a text with the message "this is what you're going to read." That doesn't speak well for his role in developing policy.

This is a man whose expertise has been ignored, whose role has been minimized, whose counsel has been rebuffed. But he hangs on, apparently determined to be the team player, the loyal soldier. That's why I call him Colin Powerless. Unlike terms like Bushleague, The Big Dick, and Cigarettebuttfarm, which are meant to be snarky, Powell's moniker is meant to be descriptive.

Updated to source the Morley quote.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Like everywhere the Bush doctrine stamps it's boot, it's two steps forward, two steps back in Afghanistan.

Back on January 6 I expressed praise and hope for the progress in Afghanistan marked by the adoption of a new constitution and the promise of elections, even as I expressed concerns about the chances of turning that hope into reality. Unhappily, it remains just that: a hope, not a reality, as the Guardian for June 12 indicates.

The elections in Afghanistan seem certain to be delayed for a second time.... The delay comes amid growing concern about the security of the election process after the killing on Thursday of 11 Chinese construction workers.

It is now impossible for the election to be held legally in September, the date for which both the interim government of President Hamid Karzai and the United Nations were aiming, itself a delay from the intended June polling day. It is understood that the new date is likely to be around October 5. ...

Even this date is by no means certain. If the security situation worsens or the registration process stalls because of violence and intimidation in the southern and south-eastern areas, a decision could be made to postpone the vote until next spring, although President [Hamid] Karzai is strongly committed to a vote this year.

Meanwhile, even though he is at this time the heavy favorite to win the presidency whenever elections do manage to come together, Karzai has

accepted the support of powerful mujahedeen leaders ... indicating he will continue an alliance with them in a future government. His move has dismayed many Afghans who were hoping that the nation's first democratic elections would herald an end to the power of the warlords, who have dominated politics for the past decade,

reported the New York Times last Sunday. While the article said Karzai insists he is opposed to a coalition government,

[i]mpartial observers say there is more involved than camaraderie among fellow former jihadis. "He knows it is the most important thing to make a bargain with the jihadis," said one Western diplomat. "He came to power with them, and he is not going to change the political dynamic," he said. ...

A coalition with the mujahedeen would prolong the many problems facing the government, [presidential candidate Massouda Jalal,] said. "With this coalition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place, collection of weapons will not take place, we will keep on having instability and anarchy, the unfairness of the current situation will not improve, and the free will of the people will not be implemented," she said.

"Technocrats" in the government are also cited as expressing worry that an alliance with the mujahedeen will result in a government lacking a genuine mandate and unable to pursue reforms.

This is taking place against the background of what AP on Sunday called "the bloodiest fighting this year" in Afghanistan, noting that since the spring both the US forces in the country, boosted by 2,000 this spring, and resistance fighters have ramped up their attacks.

Footnote, Good News and Bad News Dept.: The Guardian notes that

[o]n some levels the registration drive has been going well, said a UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan spokesman. An estimated 3.4 million people have now registered ... and women have registered in far higher numbers than expected, with at least a million enrolled.

In some provinces, including ones such as Herat regarded as conservative, women are accounting for almost half the registered voters.

However, that is still only a third of the desired number, and as AP notes, the UN team doing the registration "has yet to send voter registration teams into the most hostile areas." That is, the one-third gained so far has been the - you'll pardon the expression as it's only in comparison - easy part.

Footnote, Politics as Usual Dept.: The Guardian also notes that, shockingly,

not a single dollar pledged to pay for the elections has been given by donor countries, including members of the EU and the US.

Even if the $70m (£38m) pledged is given, there is still a shortfall in paying for the $101m costs of a proper election, an indication of how far the international community's attention has shifted away from Afghanistan since the official end of the hostilities.

That bit of amnesia, however, has not kept President Bushleague from pressing for elections in Afghanistan before November so he can point to them as a foreign policy victory. It really is all politics and perception to that crowd.

Okay, it's gone past bad into just silly

An article in the International Herald Tribune for June 14 about Tim Berners-Lee receiving the Millennium Technology Prize for his creation of the World Wide Web included this tidbit:

In April, Microsoft was awarded a U.S. patent for the use of short, long or double-clicks on the same button of a hand-held computer to launch applications, according to a report earlier this month on eWeek.com.

A patent on button clicks? Are we serious here? Does this mean that any software designer that wants to have a program on a hand-held open by double-clicking on a button has to pay Gates and company a fee?

I think the slippery slope began several years ago when Lotus Development Corp. (Full disclosure: No connection whatsoever.), purveyor of Lotus 1-2-3, successfully sued a much smaller (and much cheaper) rival for patent infringement. The claim was based on the fact that the programs appeared much the same to consumers: menus were in the same order, and so on. (This in fact was used as a selling point for the cheaper version.) Even though the underlying codes were completely different and even though no reasonable person could be thought of as buying a $100 program advertised as the inexpensive alternative to 1-2-3 in the belief that they were actually buying the $500 original, still LDC prevailed on the grounds that the similarity of "look and feel" violated their patent. (I can't say those were the actual prices, but I do recall that the cheaper version cost something around 20% of 1-2-3.)

This struck me at the time as much like, say, Ford taking out a patent on the arrangement of foot pedals, the positioning and shape of the steering wheel, and so on, and then insisting that no other auto manufacturer could lawfully duplicate the "look and feel" of their cars. That is, transparently idiotic.

But it was now precedent and for a time such suits were popular. And they opened the gates to almost everything about computers and software being the target of patents and patent suits - to the point where we are now patenting button clicks.

It's not just computers, either. People are patenting basic mathematical algorithms that have been in use for decades. They're patenting plants found in the wild. DNA sequences. Phrases. It has gotten wildly out of hand to the point where people doing basic science who are opposed to the whole trend are still patenting every detail of their research in other to defend against the possibility of someone else doing it and thus denying them access to their own work. It needs to be stopped.

It's a few years old now, but Owning the Future by Seth Shulman still deserves a read.

An interesting conundrum

Updated Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been a thorn in the side of both the US and corporate interests in Venezuela ever since he was elected in 1998. He has been repeatedly accused of authoritarianism, of being an autocrat, a murderer, even a "would-be dictator," in the words of the New York Times. The charge is not completely without merit (especially, it seems, in the campaign to get signatures on petitions for an election to recall him) but still over the top, especially since authoritarian rule always seems to be "increasing" but never seems to actually get to being authoritarian.

The main reason for the fanatical opposition is that Chavez upset the traditional house of cards where the poor in Venezuela were the "other," they were the dispossessed, the unimportant - the ignored - as the interests first of the rich and second of the middle class professionals were seen to. Chavez, instead, openly championed the cause of the poor majority.

He came into office having pledged to develop a new constitution, which was endorsed in a general referendum. In elections in 2000 under the new constitution, Chavez got 56% of the vote: the largest majority in 40 years.

But after 9/11, the oil economy was disrupted and Venezuela's economy hit the skids. Chavez's popularity among the poor dropped as he was unable to deliver on promises he made to them. Meanwhile, opposition among the monied classes continued. The result were corporate-driven general strikes followed by the overthrow of Chavez on April 12, 2002. Significantly, even as nations across Latin America condemned the coup, the US remained largely silent except to note a "change of government" which they said was provoked by "undemocratic actions committed or encouraged by the Chavez administration."

However, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Venezuelans turned out into the streets to demand his return, and in short order the coup was put down and Chavez, who had been held in a secret location, was back in office. It was only after Chavez was reinstalled that the US joined with all of Latin America in condemning the coup. (By the way, some refuse to call it a coup because there is some disagreement as to whether Chavez was directly forced out or whether the opposition just created such chaos that he "chose" to resign. I call that a distinction without a difference, especially since some coup leaders bragged that they engineered the violence that prompted the overthrow.)

That was not the end of it, as having failed to oust Chavez illegally, the opposition decided to try a legal method: recall, allowed for under the constitution the "autocrat" Chavez got approved. Despite some legal setbacks and reported instances of intimidation by pro-Chavez forces, including government officials, they have succeeded in getting the requisite number of signatures and there will be a referendum on August 15.

(The extent of intimidation is hard to gauge since the private media in Venezuela is solidly in line with corporate interests; at least some of the incidents lack independent verification.)

(Sidebar: According to Harper's Index for May, last September the National Endowment for Democracy gave $53,400 in federal funds to a group organizing the recall. Of course, such foreign money would be illegal if given to a US campaign, but again, "do as I say, not as I do" is not an uncommon refrain in the halls of power in the US.)

Okay, here's where the conundrum arises. It is by no means certain that Chavez will be voted out; in fact, I believe the chances are clearly in his favor. His popularity has fallen so low that it hovers in the same area as Shrub's. But, like our White House resident, Chavez has two things in his favor: The fervor of his supporters and the fact that no one seems particularly excited about any of the alternatives. In fact, while a lot of people in Venezuela dislike (or, more accurately in many cases, are disappointed in) Chavez, a majority loathes the opposition, many leaders of which get support in single digits.

So, perhaps positioning their cannons for their post-referendum campaign, opponents are charging that Chavez may manipulate the vote, according to the New York Times for Saturday.

How? Simple: They're using touch-screen voting machines.

Yes, those touch-screen machines. The ones that are so reliable that presidential brother Jeb Bush's Florida declares that any kind of voter-receipt paper trail is totally unnecessary and claims to the contrary are "unfounded attacks." That despite the fact that in an election in that state, computers recorded 134 nonvotes in a single-issue ballot (in an election decided by 12 votes).

Now the opposition is demanding an independent audit of the signatures of the computers, but the National Electoral Council is opposed to that, saying that as an autonomous body it will tally the votes and prevent fraud. That, of course, is not good enough for the opposition, which mutters darkly about the presence of pro-Chavez board members - even though it was this same board that certified the petition signatures allowing for the vote in the first place.

So here's the conundrum for the Bushites. If they join with the Venezuelan opposition and question the balloting, they are in effect admitting that touch-screen voting machines are of doubtful reliability and security and open to manipulation, which undermines the case for their use here - and is a slap in the face of brother Jeb. But if they don't, when Chavez wins (as I think he will) and the opposition shouts "manipulation," they won't really be in a position to join the chorus. What to do, what to do?

Now, frankly, I don't trust the suckers - the machines, I mean. Too many opportunities for software glitches, technical difficulties (such as a simple misaligned screen), or direct manipulation of results, which in the absence of a means for a hand recount (of exactly the sort Florida says is unnecessary and which in fact has rendered impossible by failing to provide for any paper receipt of the vote) is just much too much of a risk for my taste.

So I'm not happy Venezuela is using them and I do believe that the sample audits should be done by some outfit like the Carter Center in order to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But those same arguments apply here - and if we're going to question the legitimacy of a vote in Venezuela because of the technology used, we damn well should raise the same questions here.

Footnote: The New York Times has editorialized against the use of touch-screen voting machines, which is good. In their news coverage about them, they have included statements from both supporters and opponents, which is to be expected. However, in the article about the referendum on Chavez, almost the entire text was taken up with reports of the machines' security flaws, glitches, and failures with barely a breath in their defense, effectively presenting the balloting as fatally flawed even before it's happened. In light of that, it's interesting to note that something the Times has editorialized against is the administration of Hugo Chavez.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Staten Island?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Inventors

This inventor's Association for the Deaf is on Volta Place in Washington, DC.

Drip...drip...drip...

I expect you've already heard about this but it does bear repeating. According to the Los Angeles Times for June 13,

[a] group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.

The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document. ...

Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.

Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush's father.

The statement is remarkable both in that such statements are rare and in the explicit and clear denunciation of Shrub's foreign policy, one marked by "arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," which has "undermined" "America's leadership role in the world," in the words of William C. Harrop, one of the signers. Harrop was the first President Bush's ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries, notes AP, which quote him as saying

"We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential."

While not endorsing John Kerry (in fact, only two of the signers have done so), the group admitted that the net effect was to express support for him, which of course lead one GOP strategist to dismiss the coming statement as simple partisan politics. (He also engaged in some cheap Psych 101 psychoanalysis, claiming the group just couldn't deal with the fact the Bush was pursuing a different policy. Every notice how often in the face of criticism they deal in personal attack and/or innuendo and how rarely they actually deal in logical argument?) The claim of partisanship, of course, came despite the fact that the signers include officials who were appointed to posts by both Reagan and Bush I, as well as by Carter and Clinton.

The bottom line is that the statement is not so much pro-Kerry as it is anti-Bush. Phyllis E. Oakley, assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research in the Clinton administration, summed it up this way:

"The core of the message is that we are so deeply concerned about the current direction of American foreign policy … that we think it is essential for the future security of the United States that a new foreign policy team come in."

Footnote one: That same goppy strategist also argued, the LA Times said, that

he did not think the group was sufficiently well-known to create significant political problems for the president.

Isn't it interesting that that's the first thing that sprang to mind? Not if the argument had any merit, but its potential effect on Bush's re-election. At least they're consistent.

Footnote two: Cliff May, a Bush administration ally, was quoted as saying

"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people [who don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the way that should have changed our thinking."

Now, Shrub had zippo foreign policy experience before being appointed president. But that's not true of the Shrubberies, many of them part of the Reagan gang who'd spent the intervening years plotting their return. So isn't May's remark actually an admission that the Bush crowd, despite their recent protestations about all they were doing about terrorism, actually had no flaming clue what they were doing?

Early to bed....

This may be it for today. I'm not feeling so well so I may just pack it in and head for tomorrow.

But - but -

According to the Guardian for June 8, the letter by Colin Powerless spelling out the relationship between the military forces of the "coalition" and Iraq, which was part of the UN Security Council resolution on the issue, says that

the multinational force will coordinate with Iraqi security forces, and refer "issues up the respective chains of command where necessary".

He adds, however, that the force "must continue to function under a framework that affords the force the status they need to accomplish their mission, and in which the contributing states have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel".

Doesn't that translate to "We'll feel free to continue to do whatever we f'ing well please?"

Just askin'.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Beacon Hill?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Head for the Hills for $2000

New York City's highest natural point, 409-foot Todt Hill, lies in this westernmost borough.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Inventors

Prompted in part by the preceding

I do not in any way intend to demean Nancy Reagan's obviously genuine grief, but besides having only Republican politicians speak at his service (not inviting either Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton to say anything) did they really plan to have Ronald Reagan's funeral at sunset, burying him "just before the sun disappeared from the gold-tinged hills in the distance?"

Is even a widow's pain not beyond exploitation for partisan symbolism?

I'm so excited and I just can't hide it....

I just got my first freeper comment, in response to my post about putting Reagan's face on money. I'm "leftist scum" who has "no heroes."

Wow! I must be getting important. LOL

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are the Black Hills?

JEOPARDY!
Head for the Hills for $1200

The Massachusetts State House was built on this hill in the late 1790s.

Sadr and Sadr

Updated Earlier this week, in what's got to be one of the more boneheaded moves of the last months in Iraq - and remember, there has been plenty of competition - Iraqi "dictator"

Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, signed an order stating that, with immediate effect, members of illegal militias "will be barred from holding political office for three years after leaving their illegal organisation,"

according to the Guardian for June 8. This came one day after the announcement that

Iraq's new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, ... reached a deal to disband militias that opposed Saddam Hussein.

About 100,000 fighters will either join the security forces or return to civilian life, Mr Allawi said. ...

Nine political factions - most of them represented in Mr Allawi's interim cabinet - agreed to disband their associated militias by January 2005, when elections are due. ...

"As of now, all armed forces outside of state control, as provided by this order, are illegal," the prime minister said.

(That from the BBC for June 7.)

Or, more exactly, militias that are not government supporters are now illegal, since those included in the deal, rather than disbanding immediately, will continue to exist for several months, right up until planned elections.

What this means, though, is the Bremer's order really has one and only one significant effect: banning Moqtada al-Sadr from standing for office in those elections because

[e]ven if Mr Sadr disbanded his Mahdi Army in the next few weeks it would be too late for him to join Iraq's political process and contest the elections, due in January.

This is a really stupid move. Undoubtedly, it was done out of fear of the level of support he could gather in a run for the parliament, but the result is to take his supporters, largely young and unemployed, who already feel disaffected, who already feel (with good cause) that they have neither say nor stake in any present or proposed government, and disenfranchise them even further, indeed to rub their faces in the fact. Someone should have reminded Bremer of John Kennedy's dictum that "those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

In response, according to al-Jazeera on Monday,

[a]l-Sadr aides dismissed the new order, insisting that the Mahdi Army was a popular movement rather than a militia.

"This agreement does not concern us because we are not a militia. We are a popular and radical movement and we are not looking for political posts," said aide Husam al-Husayni.

It's hard to tell if that's sincere or sour grapes, especially since al-Sadr has previously publicly embraced democracy (or at least the planned elections version of it); indeed, the same article says that

Shia militiamen loyal to leader Muqtada al-Sadr have vowed not to withdraw from the most sacred shrine in the city of Najaf until a democratic Iraqi government takes power in January 2005.

"If America promises to handover sovereignty and Iraqis start to get what they need, the Mahdi Army will recognise the legitimate government," main al-Sadr spokesman Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani told AFP on Monday.

That certainly seems to indicate at least verbal support for elections - although, as I've noted previously, it's hard to tell if that's out of commitment to the idea of democracy or a commitment to the idea that "democracy" means strictly majority (that is, Shi'ite) rule.

In any event, what it clearly does mean is that al-Sadr supporters are intending to maintain their armed resistance. And indeed, despite a week-old truce under which al-Sadr agreed to withdraw his militia from Najaf and have them put away their weapons, a truce which has largely held, there still have been clashes

As described by the Toronto Globe & Mail, in one incident, which broke out on Wednesday,

[g]unmen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr attacked the station [police headquarters] near the city's Revolution of 1920 Square after authorities tried to arrest suspected thieves, police and witnesses said. Mr. al-Sadr's spokesman, Qais al-Khazali, said the police shot first and that the fighting continued because the family members of one slain fighter were seeking revenge.

"We are trying to convince them to stop shooting," Mr. al-Khazali said. "We are still committed to the truce."

The BBC reports that the militants used machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the attack and, again according to the BBC, after the initial assault,

[f]ighting then moved to a second police station, which fell under the control of the militants when the police ran out of ammunition.

The station was ransacked but later recovered.

In addition, al-Jazeera for June 11 reports that Sadr City is also seeing violence.

One Iraq fighter has been killed and several children seriously wounded in a Baghdad suburb following clashes overnight between followers of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr and US occupation troops.

But what struck me even more in that same report was this:

The southern city of Najaf, another battleground for al-Sadr fighters and the occupation, was largely quite on Friday following clashes a day earlier which left five people killed.

But Friday prayers were cancelled after fistfights broke out around the city's most holy shrine.

The trouble started when hundreds of protesters marched toward the Imam Ali Shrine to express support for a peace plan which was threatened by clashes the day before.

Supporters of al-Sadr blocked their way and fights broke out between the two groups. The shrine was evacuated and its doors closed as a security precaution, witnesses said.

CNN adds the details that the demonstrators were with SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, closely aligned to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani) and says that in addition to the fistfights,

[g]unfire then erupted for about 30 minutes, with several Iraqis on both sides wounded.

Aside from pointing up the fact that Sadr is by no means universally popular (although Bremer has probably just bumped him up a few notches by returning to him the mantle of "symbol of the resistance" which had been slipping from his shoulders) it reminded me of something else:

Where was Sadr during this time? I don't mean physically, I mean in terms of public pronouncements, public positions. After meeting with Sistani last Saturday, he'd been keeping a low profile.

His silence, coupled with Khazali's assurances that Sadr's people were trying to stop the fighting in Najaf - not to forget a fistfight in the yard of a mosque between his supporters and those of SCIRI as well as my notions that Sadr had come to realize he had "overplayed his hand, perhaps severely" - reminded me of something I wrote way back in August 1988. The issue then was Jesse Jackson's having been coy about whether or not he would accept the Democratic nomination for Vice-President as Michael Dukakis's running mate.

I think Jackson wasn't sure he wanted the job, but felt pressured by his supporters, who were saying very loudly that the spot should be his almost by right. Another risk any leader runs is generating a tide that can carry you places you're not sure you want to go.

I've been wondering if Sadr has been feeling that same ambivalence, worried that some things - some supporters - are getting beyond his grasp, starting to do things in his name that he himself might not endorse, in fact which he might at least tactically oppose. Support for that contention can be found in an AP article for June 11 which reports that Sadr now says he will cooperate with the new government if it works to end US military presence.

The conciliatory tone by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr came during a sermon read by an aide to a congregation in Kufa, scene of recent fighting between his al-Mahdi Army militia and U.S. forces.

In the sermon, the fiery young cleric said "I support the new interim government" and asked his followers to "help me take this society to the path of security and peace."

"Starting now, I ask you that we open a new page for Iraq and for peace," the message said.

Al-Sadr had dismissed the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi as a tool of the Americans. But he apparently softened his stand under pressure from mainstream Shiite Muslim leaders....

In an interview Friday night with Al Arabiya television, al-Sadr's spokesman, Ahmed al-Shibani, said the cleric was ready for a dialogue with the government "on condition that it works to end the occupation and clearly announces to the Iraqi people and to the world that it rejects the occupation."

By that statement, he has essentially aligned himself with Sistani, who said last week that the way for the new government to prove its legitimacy was by "endeavor[ing] to erase all traces of the occupation."

So for the moment at least, Sadr and Sistani are on the same page, both making what is likely as not the tactical decision to in effect urge giving the interim government a chance to prove itself. Whether or not that government will - or even is able to - do what's necessary to that end remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain: The back of the hand given to Sadr's supporters by that jackass Bremer is not going to make things any easier.

Footnote: Sorry to recent visitors, I messed up again, this time posting a partly-finished version of this rather than the final one. My apologies.

Attack of the 50-foot Geek

Hey, if they have have doubts, let 'em check out my wonderful, intelligent border collie.

A very smart collie dog named Rico has stunned German researchers by learning words with the apparent flair of a young child, Science magazine reports.

Rico understands more than 200 words and can work out the meaning of new ones, by a process of elimination.

What is more, Rico can often remember new words after a whole month - even though he has only heard them once before, the scientists claim. ...

From the study of a German family's Border collie, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology say that some aspects of speech comprehension evolved earlier than, and separate from, human speech. ...

Julia Fischer and colleagues set up experiments in which a new toy was placed amongst seven familiar toys.

When Rico was asked to fetch the new item, using a name it had never heard before, he correctly retrieved it in seven out of 10 attempts.

The researchers say that he appreciates, as do young children, that new words tend to belong to objects that do not already have names. ...

A month later, having been denied access to the new toys, Rico could often still remember the new names. ...

Rico's performance, say scientists, is comparable to a three-year-old child.

Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for life sciences, said: "Such fast, one-trail learning in dogs is remarkable."

"This ability suggests that the brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans and may have formed the evolutionary basis of some of the advanced language abilities of humans." ...

We humans are always on the lookout for language ability in other animals, but is Rico really demonstrating that?

Alex Kacelnik, a behavioural ecologist from Oxford University, UK, believes he might not be. ...

Rico is good at linking concepts, Professor Kacelnik believes, but that does not mean he has a special predisposition to understand language.

"From the point of view of Rico, there may not be anything special about sounds," he explained. "We don't know that Rico has a particular ability to link sounds to objects, rather than link any arbitrary stimulus to objects.

"I suspect it would be the case that if we used 200 different smells Rico would perform better." ...

"Rico probably has the general ability to connect things - not a language ability."

Kacelnik's speculation about smells is just that - speculation - but it occurs to me that without meaning to, it raises a real issue. What underlies his argument is the notion that language is to be described in terms of sounds. Put another way, he's equating language itself with human language.

But is that right? Is it the only possibility? What does it mean "to language?"

It would seem to me that language, or perhaps more accurately the idea of languaging - would better be described as the ability to transmit information by applying an abstract meaning to some form of sensory input. If indeed, Rico would do better with smells, if say the smell of a certain flavor Ken-L Ration dog biscuit could also signify "the red ball," doesn't that, rather than discrediting the idea that what he's showing is a language ability, instead raise the possibility of a smell-based language?

There, there, Bonnie. It's okay, it's just because they don't know you. Good girl.

Just in case...

...you haven't come across this elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal has made portions of the deservedly infamous March 2003 memo available in .pdf (i.e., Adobe Acrobat) format here.

Read it and weep.

Give me hope, help me cope....

This is going to be one of those long-excerpt-brief-comment posts that I try to avoid, but I just really liked this story and have nothing of substance to add except that it's an example of taking your hope where you can find it.

From the BBC for June 11:

A small community radio station in Democratic Republic of Congo has won the Special Award at the One World Media Awards in London.

Richard Pituwa, founder of Radio Canal Revelation, accepted the prestigious prize at a ceremony on Thursday.

Operating on a tiny budget the station provides news, civic education, health and music programmes to the north-eastern town of Bunia. ...

"We feel very small in the face of this very big thing," said Mr Pituwa to a crowded audience of broadcasters, filmmakers, aid agencies and non-governmental organisations.

The station was started in 2000 during ethnic fighting between Hema and Lendu militias, when "many people found themselves voiceless", Barry Sesnan from the United Nations Development Programme told the BBC.

"Youths no longer had jobs... and many opted to become combatants.

"But a small group decided they would do something about it and set up a little a radio station which they created from old mobile phone handsets, old bits of wire and large amounts of spirit," he said.

It reaches 200,000 people in and around Bunia and is especially aimed at the young, and has become a lifeline for many in this remote region.

Radio Canal Revelation has become an important barometer of the opinions of young people, who communicate regularly with the station.

"As mobile phones have come there, have even been people phoning in with questions about Aids and the peace process," Mr Sesnan said.

Run by some 70 volunteers from all sides of the community, the station is also used by the UN as part of its reconciliation work.

Broadcasting in French, Swahili and Lingala, the station continued to air its programmes throughout the ethnic disputes, aiming to remain neutral.

The Beeb also notes that the station has served as a link in reuniting families dispersed by the conflict. All power to the peacemakers.

Slammer!

Via TalkLeft, I hear that Sami Omar Al-Hussayen has been acquitted after a seven-week trial in Boise, Idaho.

He was the grad student I wrote about back on April 27 who was charged with 14 counts of aiding terrorism, making false statements, and visa fraud for his role as webmaster to sites that had posts (none of which he wrote) supporting suicide bombings and links to other sites with similar material.

As AP reports on June 10,

[t]he case ... was seen as an important test of a provision of the Patriot Act that makes it a crime to provide expert advice or assistance to terrorists.

But after a week of deliberation, the jury acquitted him on all the terrorism counts and some of the others. A mistrial was declared on those.

It's likely the government pushed this case because they figured it would be easier to get a conviction in conservative Idaho, thereby establishing a precedent for future prosecutions. As it turns out, they did get their precedent, just happily not the one they wanted. So take that, Cigarettebuttfarm.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Purple Heart?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Head for the Hills for $400

Rapid City, South Dakota is the most populous city in these hills.

Slow day redux

Expect another light day today. I do science presentations in schools for a living and I have to do one tomorrow morning for which I just received the materials yesterday. Which means I had last night and tonight to teach myself a new program from scratch.

So I might be kinda distracted.

Things should be back to normal tomorrow.

He's hit the road, Jack

The great Ray Charles died today at his Beverly Hills home at the age of 73.

My own favorite memory involving Charles is, I suppose, an odd one. He was to be a guest on a Barry Manilow TV special several years ago, as part of which he was to do one of Manilow's songs. It seems that during rehearsals, Manilow's mother turned to him and said "I'm sorry, Barry, but he sings it so much better than you do."

He was to my mind by no means a great singer in the classic sense of the term, but the expression, the pacing, the intonation, the style turned an ordinary voice into an instrument of moving quality.

Footnote: I watched the special (Yes, I was a Barry Manilow fan and don't give me any guff about it. I take my politics straight and hard so as a balance I take my music sometimes sappy.) and sing it better? Oh, my, did he ever.

A banana peel and a cliff

This story comes to us from the website of a TV station in Washington, DC

Cumberland, MD, June 6 - An Amtrak train heading to Washington from Chicago was stopped and searched at the Cumberland yard in western Maryland after a member of the U.S. military reported that two men of Middle Eastern descent were acting suspiciously.

Authorities said one of the men appeared to have an unknown object concealed beneath his clothing.

One passenger told News4, "They told everybody to get off the train and FBI agents came and a sniper came, he had a gun, and the canine unit came. We were waiting outside for about two hours."

The two men were questioned and released Sunday night, Amtrak spokesman Dan Stessel said, with law enforcement officials deeming "them no longer of interest."

The train's 233 passengers, including the two men, were eventually sent to Union Station by bus. They arrived at around 10:30 Sunday night.

A bomb squad and dogs searched at least 12 of the cars and found no explosives.

A couple of things disturb me about this.

"A member of the US military." What does that mean? Some GI? A military intelligence office secretly assigned to ride trains to watch for "suspicious behavior?" Is that it came from a member of the military supposed to give the suspicion added credence? Why?

"Men of Middle Eastern descent." Does it matter where they were from? Is that tidbit, again, supposed to add weight to the claim? Why? If these men were not "of Middle Eastern descent," would the same behavior have been regarded as suspicious? Would the same response have been given? If not, why not?

"Object concealed beneath his clothing." Well, did he? What was it?

"Everybody off the train." If the concern was two men "acting suspiciously," why not limit it to those men? Why involve everyone? How did we make the leap from "two suspicious guys" to searching at least most of the train, apparently for bombs?

"Sniper." What he hell was he doing there? What was he expected to accomplish? Are we supposed to imagine the "suspicious guys" had accomplices hiding in the trees right where the train was stopped? Or was this just to increase the sense of danger felt by the passengers?

It seems to me that what happened, bluntly, is that some soldier made a racist judgment about two other passengers which ended up generating a paranoid (and possibly racist) overreaction. Or maybe, since I'm in a conspiratorial mood right now, it wasn't an overreaction. I wrote just yesterday about my concern that we are becoming - being - inured to police intrusions, police authority, police orders, to passively accepting police disruption of our lives. Maybe this was regarded as much as an opportunity as an investigation.

And I don't want to hear any "better safe than sorry" poppycock. That is a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies a genuine police state with personal freedom and privacy de jure as well as de facto a thing of the past. Freedom carries risks but they are worth it. So instead of handing me that line, read Erich Fromm's classic Escape From Freedom.

Supergeek

One of the hallmarks of complex life is the development of creatures with a two-sided body plan. Mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, all fit the description: They are creatures with a left and a right side that are roughly mirror images, or symmetrical. This is as compared to simpler, earlier life forms that had no such symmetry (such as amoebas).

Well,

[b]lob-like fossils dating back about 600 million years may indicate that complex life evolved much earlier on our planet than had been thought, scientists say.

The animals are less than a fifth of a millimetre long and have a two-sided body plan previously thought to have existed much later in Earth's history.

These "bilaterians" have what look like mouths and guts, as well as internal and external layers of body tissue. ...

The animals - their scientific name is given as Vernanimalcula guizhouena - even have what look like pits in their outer surface that might have contained sensory organs.

If the find holds up - and some scientists are openly skeptical, suggesting that what look like fossils might be natural mineral formations - it would push back the development of complex life to at least 50 million years before the so-called "Cambrian explosion" which featured a seeming sudden emergence of a huge variety of shapes and sizes.

It could affect not only the timeline of evolution but our understanding of it. Stephen Jay Gould's terrific book on the Cambrian explosion, Wonderful Life, was what convinced me as an interested layperson of the validity of the "punctuated equilibrium" notion of evolution, which features sudden outbursts of change with little change between. That's as opposed to the more traditional idea of slow but relatively steady accumulation of small genetic changes selected for survival. (I like to imagine punctuated equilibrium as being like a water pressure valve designed to release pressure if it exceeds a certain level. Invisibly to the observer, the pressure is building up - in life terms, DNA changes are accumulating - until it reaches a critical point when there is a sudden, dramatic shift.)

However, if the roots of complexity are much older than thought, that is, as research team leader Jun-Yuan Chen of Nanjing University writes,

the genetic toolkit and pattern formation mechanisms required for bilaterian development had already evolved by Doushantuo times, long before the Cambrian,

the "explosion" may not have been quite the sudden burst scientists had believed, which could affect the reading of "punctuated equilibrium" versus "steady accumulation of change over time."

I should note that Gould was a rather controversial figure among paleontologists, who accused him of all sorts of intellectual crimes, most of which boiled down to he had a flaming big ego (which he most certainly did), he had political convictions (which he also did, and very progressive ones), and he disagreed with the ideas of the paleontologists who were accusing him of having an ego and political convictions.

While the ideal of science is a dispassionate search for truth, of course it rarely works that way in practice, and personalities and egos play a real role. Nowhere is that more true, it seems, in paleontology and archaeology, where disputes over hypotheses can become quite bitter and personal. I suspect it's because unlike, say, physics where you can at least hope to have quantifiable results that will settle things one way or another, paleontology and archaeology will forever have a large measure of interpretation. So it's necessary to constantly filter through personal animosities to get at the actual arguments. (Interestingly, one of Gould's controversial arguments, one for which he received a great deal of flak, is that the science of a time is affected by the cultural atmosphere that surrounds it.)

Ultimately, I believe that much of the criticism directed against Gould was that he wrote for a popular audience rather than focusing on research to be published in scholarly journals. Because of that, he was considered by some to be somehow less of a scientist and therefore less deserving of serious consideration - and therefore those same some tended to be outraged by (and jealous of) his notoriety. This was much the same fate that befell Carl Sagan, whose public popularity was in and of itself sufficient cause for some to malign him as an astronomer.

Yes, we do need the scientists who will do the uncelebrated research and publish in musty, jargon-laden journals that only others in their field will read (or understand). But we also need the popularizers, the scientists who understand what others have discovered and translate it into terms the rest of us can understand, appreciate, and become excited by. Sagan was one such, Gould was another.

Footnote: For a somewhat dated but still fuller discussion of the debate between punctuated equilibrium and gradual change, try here.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are the San Francisco Giants?

JEOPARDY!
Good Dog! for $1000

Wounded while flushing out a machine gun nest during World War II, Chips received the Silver Star for valor and this medal.

Bummer

This from Hesiod at Counterspin via an autoresponse to email:

My friend, I have decided for personal reasons to stop blogging entirely for the foreseeable future. Please understand my choice is a personal one, and I hope you will honor and respect it. In the mean time, keep up the good fight.

I hope this was simply because he needed a break, not for some harsher reason. In any event, he will be missed.

Day off kinda

Very light blogging today, and most of that has consisted of making comments on other people's posts. In fact, I'm pretty much taking the day off to catch up on work stuff and housework.

Talk among yourselves.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a St. Bernard?

JEOPARDY!
Good Dog! for $600

Portuguese water dogs fetch homers hit from this team's park into San Francisco Bay.

Enough!

Okay, that's it, this was the breaking point for me, the point where concern, worry, opposition, and frustration turned into open rage.

Boston (AP, June 8) - Transit police will begin randomly stopping riders on Boston's subways and commuter trains next month to search their bags and packages, a procedure transportation officials say was largely prompted by the March 11 train bombings in Spain. ...

MBTA police already can request to see the identification of passengers they perceive to be acting suspiciously. ...

MBTA Deputy Police Chief John Martino, who is overseeing the development and implementation of the search policy, said police, sometimes accompanied by explosive-sniffing dogs, will randomly pick out riders for inspection throughout the transit system daily. He said the number of inspections would increase dramatically during the convention July 26-29.

This disgusting display of untrammeled power to abuse rights and ignore privacy is the step over the edge for me, the one that demonstrates empirically what was already clear in theory, that all this is more about police power than public protection.

Of course it was justified with the same fear-mongering blather such assaults on our lives always are.

"I have no trepidation about being first (in the nation with the policy)," [MBTA Police Chief Joseph] Carter said. "I don't want to be the first to do an interview about having a serious incident that may have some terrorist indications to it. ... We want to do this to encourage people to feel safe on the MBTA, to utilize public transportation."

We want you to feel safe. It's for your own good. We're just protecting you from GASP! the terrorists! Who are everywhere! They could be right next to you! The train could explode at any moment! Oh no! Oh no! So just keep quiet and do exactly as we say and everything will be okay.

I recall the words of Herman Goering:

[I]t's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

(The quote is sometimes labeled apocryphal, but as the urban legend-busters at Snopes.com point out, that's because he didn't say it at the Nuremberg trials, as is sometimes claimed, but in a private conversation with Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist and intelligence officer who interviewed him during his trial.)

The mealy-mouthed, legalistic response of the ACLU didn't impress me, either.

Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said that while she understands the need for security, the MBTA plan is deeply flawed and may violate the U.S. Constitution's ban on unreasonable search and seizure.

"Flawed?" "May?" The thing is a flaming outrage that proposes to use free-floating fear to decimate the Fourth Amendment.

I remember that years ago, when I was living in New Jersey, the state police had gotten a major reputation for stopping people on the Turnpike for "routine checks." (That reputation was bad enough at one time that friends in the UK told me that the travel books there geared to students told them to avoid New Jersey entirely.) Ultimately, the issue came before the state Supreme Court which in a ringing decision banned the practice, declaring that there is no such thing as a legitimate "routine check." That if a car is stopped, if a driver is questioned, there must be a reason.

There must be a reason. So in order to have a "reason," we now have the weasel word "suspicious." It's because you were "acting suspicious." Or you "looked suspicious." There was "reasonable suspicion."

Well, I say that's crap. A standard as vague as "suspicion," standing on its own, is no standard at all. It's meaningless. It's empty, vapid, bogus, a ploy, a platitude, an excuse rather than a reason. It can't be enough for some cop to say they had "suspicions," they had damned well better be able to say exactly what behavior was suspicious and exactly what was suspicious about it. If they can't, not only should any charges vanish, the cop should be liable for civil damages on a charge of abuse of authority. And to those who would say that would make cops "reluctant to act," I say good: There should be a reluctance to commit abuse.

I don't get into Boston that often anymore, but when I do, it's usually on the T (the subway, for those of you outside the area). Because of the number of people who ride the T and the infrequency with which I use it, it is very unlikely that I would be picked out for a "random" search. But I say here and now that if that does happen, I will refuse unless I can be given a damn good - that is, to my satisfaction damn good - reason why I was picked out, and "random chance" won't cut it.

Good - the anger is rising just about the right time to get ready for the "free speech zones" I expect will be erected around the Democratic Convention.

Footnote: According to the same article, last month

the U.S. Transportation Security Administration unveiled a pilot program to screen the bags of all passengers at a single Maryland Rail Commuter station in suburban New Carrollton.

We are being steadily inured to the idea that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply anywhere except within your own home with the doors and windows closed, the blinds drawn, the phone disconnected, and all conversations held in a faint whisper. That as soon as you step beyond that enclosed space, you are fair game to be stopped, your identity demanded, your bags and your person searched. So far, the score is about Police Power-Producing Paranoia 31, Fourth Amendment 2. Still, the game isn't over yet, but it's getting into the late innings.

Trackbacks and tips

Fred at Stone Court has a trackback to my post about enshrining Ronnie the R. on our cash. (The trackback actually appeared on my post about Burntfarm's appearance before the Senate, but no matter.) What he said was sharp enough that I wanted to repeat it here. Referring to the notion of putting Reagan on the $10 or $20 bill, he said

If you had to sum up what those two men symbolize, what would it be? I nominate:

Hamilton - fiscal responsibility

Jackson - democracy

And what exactly is it we are being offered in their place?

Now, no analogy is perfect, of course, and while I can't say just how fiscally responsible Hamilton was, I can say that Jacksonian democracy was not as inclusive in fact as it is in our mythology. But no matter, Fred hones the issue to a nicely clarifying point.

Oh, and another benefit of trackbacks: Looking at Stone Court as a result, I was tipped to an item from AP for June 5.

Baghdad, Iraq - While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline - a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers.

Before the war, forecasters predicted that by invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein, America would benefit from increased exports of oil from Iraq, which has the world's second largest petroleum reserves.

Instead, average gasoline prices in the US have increased by nearly a third over the pre-invasion price, to just over $2.00 a gallon - while in the UK, the price hit $5.79 last week. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, drivers can fill a 22-gallon tank for $1.10.

The reason, it seems, is to keep a lid on potential anger by keeping the price low. Iraq has lots of oil, but little refinery capacity.

So the U.S. government pays about $1.50 a gallon to buy fuel in neighboring countries and deliver it to Iraqi stations. A three-month supply costs American taxpayers more than $500 million, not including the cost of military escorts to fend off attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

Gotta love that dedication to the free market.

Footnote: AP notes that this is actually an improvement, as the government

paid even more last year for Iraqis' gasoline - between $1.59 and $1.70 per gallon - when the imports were contracted to Halliburton, the Texas oil services giant formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yeah! More of that good news progress the rightos are always saying we ignore!

Okay, this probably isn't an example they'd want chosen....

More on making it explicit

Consider this a footnote to yesterday's post.

Washington (AP, June 8) - Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday he was not aware of any order by President Bush that would violate U.S. laws or treaties banning torture of military prisoners captured in Iraq or elsewhere in the war on terrorism.

"This administration rejects torture," Ashcroft declared under tense questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he steadfastly refused to comment directly about a policy paper on this issue, or say whether Bush ever responded to it.

Yeah, but - but -

One of the arguments made in the paper is that if done under presidential order, it wouldn't be a violation of law. So Ashcroft's statement is meaningless except as possible subterfuge.

And considering what we already know and what has already been acknowledged, it's hard to credit the statement that the White House "rejects torture" except to the extent it defines the term so narrowly that nothing short of the rack or burning with red-hot irons would qualify.

(And by the way, why do White House water carriers keep saying "this administration?" Is Ashcroft implying that some other administration would countenance torture?)

No 10 times, no 20 times

And it does make a dime's worth of difference to me.

New York (CNN/Money, June 8) - Ronald Reagan's face could one day adorn the $10 bill or half the dimes minted in the country, if fans of the late president get their way.

Apparently legislation is to be introduced in the Senate to plaster Ronnie's smirking puss on the $10 bill, bumping Alexander Hamilton, while in the House it's Andrew Jackson's $20 bill that's in the line of fire. The efforts "have the support of" - read "were prompted by" - Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which wants "dedications" to Bonzo literally everywhere you look.

In fact, the effort to beatify Reagan began long before now as conservatives, doubtless aware that their arguments don't stand up to logical scrutiny and can only be sustained by deception, distortion, and distraction - and that eventually people do catch on despite their efforts - want to put Reagan and his "legacy" in the "out there," that gauzy area of hagiographic mist where such as Abraham Lincoln and "the Founding Fathers" reside. They don't want that legacy discussed or described, just referred to in terms of ingrained adoration.

(There was even an earlier move to put him on the $10 bill, which lost steam when even Nancy opposed it and an attempt to push a Reagan postage stamp which stalled when it was pointed out that - oops - it's common to wait until the person is actually dead to do that. At the same time, PostalMag.com notes that every deceased president has gotten a stamp and says a Reagan one should be out within a year.)

And of course they know there's a good chance their plot will fail for lack of Congressional support, so they have a fallback.

Proponents of Reaganized money, however, are proposing an alternative to paper money: coins. Unlike decisions about notes, coinage can be changed at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury.

That way, they don't actually have to have a debate or anything equally icky, they just have to lobby one of the Shrubberies.

Originally, they wanted the twerp's mug to replace FDR's on the dime, but that didn't fly, so now they propose to have each on half the dimes. Treasury will only say that discussion of the idea is "premature ... Including discussions of process or timing," which makes me suspicious that discussions of the idea are exactly what have already taken place.

Well, if they really want to honor Ronnie Raygun, if they're really set on this, I have my own proposal: Start reissuing $1000 notes and have his portrait on them.

At least that way, I'd never have to see them.

50 Million Miles to Geek

This is major cool.

There could be life on the planet Venus, US scientists have concluded in a report in the journal Astrobiology.

The existence of life on the planet's oven-hot surface is unimaginable.

But microbes could survive and reproduce, experts say, floating in the thick, cloudy atmosphere, protected by a sunscreen of sulphur compounds.

Early on, Earth and Venus were pretty much alike. However, Venus's greater proximity to the Sun caused any water to boil away while generating a runaway greenhouse effect that turned the surface into "a hellish place" with crushing atmospheric pressures and temperatures that could melt lead, all wreathed in clouds of sulphuric acid.

But, according to Louis Irwin of the University of Texas at El Paso, the changes on Venus may have been slow. "It may well have been Earth-like long enough for life to either emerge or be transported there," he said.

Once established, life would have adapted to every environment, just as it did on Earth.

What makes this more intriguing is that

[t]wo years ago, Austrian scientists discovered bacteria living and reproducing within clouds on Earth. ...

The Venusian clouds are high in the atmosphere, where the temperature and pressure are quite Earth-like. There is even water present, though it is in the form of concentrated sulphuric acid.

But we now know of organisms that thrive in very acidic environments on Earth.

In fact, the sulphuric atmosphere could actually assist by providing protection against ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. David Grinspoon of the South West Research Institute in Colorado even

speculates that the organisms might even have evolved ways of making use of the UV, much like Earth plants use visible light for photosynthesis.

"One lifeform's deadly radiation may be another lifeform's lunch," he added.

Life is just so amazingly cool.