Anthrax - a cautionary tale

I wasn't blogging when, one week after the 9/11 attack, mailed anthrax killed five people, seriously injured 17 others, and paralyzed much of American commerce.

If I had been blogging back then, I'm pretty sure I would have joined in the general attack on an innocent man. It was a heck of an attack; this month The Atlantic tells the story of how the FBI got the wrong man. He (and his lawyers) ended up with various settlements totaling millions of dollars.

Later the FBI turned on Bruce Ivins, a troubled man. Turns out biological warfare research attracts unusual people. Ivins committed suicide. Since the post 9/11 FBI has well deserved negative credibility, nobody is fully convinced that Ivins was the murderer.

The FBI was never reformed. It staggers on today.

What have some of us learned from the anthrax story? We learned that the FBI is institutionally troubled. We learned that government can break the rules and get away with it. We learned that when crisis hits, we lose our bearings. We learned that defense lawyers are a good idea. We learned that massive security failures can be easily forgotten.

There was never a full evaluation of all the ways the FBI failed, and why. Bush/Cheney had too much dirty laundry of their own to go there, and Obama has way too much Bush/Cheney dirty laundry to clearn.

So the FBI is going to do this again.

The Cheonan sinking: insanity or accident?

When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.

This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.

A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…

BBC News - Seoul's dilemma over sunken warship

The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…

… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.

The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.

… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.

… "If it's a torpedo firing then that's about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don't do it…

… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.

Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.

But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.

So the options are …

• North Korea’s leadership is insane
• North Korea’s military is insane
• It’s a freak accident with an impossibly ancient mine

The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.

An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.

Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.

We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.

Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.

My money is on blunder.

Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.

A conscience for robots - and for humans too

It costs a huge amount of resources to develop a functioning human adult. That's a price of being a social animal with a massively overclocked brain.

Not surprisingly, evolution has made us feeble killers. Our teeth, claws, and muscles are pathetic. Most adult humans are traumatized when they kill -- even when it's in self-defense and even after extensive training and conditioning. Only immature children kill easily, which is why child soldiers are valued by the world's most evil men. (See also: vertromedial injuries).

On the other hand, evolution hasn't had time to adjust to murder at a distance. Pilots do not seem to experience the trauma felt by marines, even though they may kill many more people. This has advantages for warfare, but there are problems with making killing too easy. These problems are showing up with drone use ...

Remote-control warfare: Droning on | The Economist

... If they have not been so commandeered, attacks on such sites may constitute war crimes. And drone attacks often kill civilians. On June 23rd 2009, for example, an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan killed 80 non-combatants.

Such errors are not only tragic, but also counterproductive. Sympathetic local politicians will be embarrassed and previously neutral non-combatants may take the enemy’s side. Moreover, the operators of drones, often on the other side of the world, are far removed from the sight, sound and smell of the battlefield. They may make decisions to attack that a commander on the ground might not, treating warfare as a video game.

Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself—or, rather, the software that is used to operate it—in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience.

The software conscience that Dr Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called the Ethical Architecture. Its judgment may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And—like a human but unlike most machines—it can learn.

The drone would initially be programmed to understand the effects of the blast of the weapon it is armed with. It would also be linked to both the Global Positioning System (which tells it where on the Earth’s surface the target is) and the Pentagon’s Global Information Grid, a vast database that contains, among many other things, the locations of buildings in military theatres and what is known about their current use.

After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. It would note any damage to nearby buildings and would subsequently receive information from other sources, such as soldiers in the area, fixed cameras on the ground and other aircraft. Using this information, it could compare the level of destruction it expected with what actually happened. If it did more damage than expected—for example, if a nearby cemetery or mosque was harmed by an attack on a suspected terrorist safe house—then it could use this information to restrict its choice of weapon in future engagements. It could also pass the information to other drones.

No commander is going to give a machine a veto, of course, so the Ethical Architecture’s decisions could be overridden. That, however, would take two humans—both the drone’s operator and his commanding officer...

Even if this particular implementation doesn't succeed, it makes a great deal of sense to build in this kind of automated oversight.

Obviously it's not simply of interest to weapons, though that's where the initial funding will come from. Even if we don't get sentient machines in the next fifty years (if you're the praying type, pray we don't), we will be deploying systems that make many risk/benefit trade-offs in many contexts. We will benefit if they evolve a conscience.

Some humans too would benefit from a prosthetic conscience. It might allow persons with disorders of conscience to function more effectively in the modern world. Our prisons are full of low IQ individuals with a limited capacity to model the impacts of their actions on other persons. A prosthetic conscience might allow them to avoid prison, or to have great success after prison life.

Of course if we do develop non-human sentience, it might be very much to our advantage if they felt qualms about hurting us ...

Reflections on friends who vote GOP

I have not been a fan of the modern GOP. I see today's GOP as the party of torture, corruption, thoughtless bellicosity, cynical manipulation of American fears and hatreds, bad policy, anti-science, anti-reason, and so on. I also disagree with most GOP values, though my support for abortion rights is unenthusiastic.

And so, when a good person and a friend writes asking when I might join the "sane" party, I am taken aback. My Dems are often (mostly?) corrupt, pompous and venal - but I do think of them as the saner party. How can good people feel the GOP is the sane alternative? It is suspiciously convenient to say these people are delusional. Instead I'll try to examine their beliefs along four chasms - Facts, Values, Faith and Tribe. I think I can understand their beliefs best in those terms.

Facts

Not everyone obsessively follows hundreds of blogs and uses selected super-readers as fact filters. More reasonably, but unfortunately, not everyone reads factcheck.org. If you live in some parts of the country, and if you don't read online news or the New York Times, you will be told many things that are not true. More perniciously, you won't hear of anything that might change your perceptions.

If you believe the chain letters, or the WSJ OpEd page, or Murdoch's newspapers, you may well believe the Democrats are insane.

This seems like the easiest canyon to bridge. Facts, after all, can be tested. Predictions can be falsified. In reality, however, Vulcans are few. People may be attracted false facts because they support three other chasms.

Values and culture

What do the strong owe the weak? When do the ends justify the means? What are the limits to tolerance? What far can Americans move from a cultural mean?

These are fundamental differences. A good and generous person may feel they owe nothing to the weak save what they choose to give. That person is a natural supporter of the GOP. These are legitimate distinctions

Faith

We usually think of Faith in terms of Deities, but there can also be a Faith in Markets. Faith, by definition, is not amenable to discussion. If you believe the true duty of all men is to serve a particular deity, then your first political choice must be to support the Party closest to your deity. If you believe that Markets are infallible, then you must support a Party that shares your belief.

The chasm of Faith is a legitimate distinction between the GOP and the Democrats. Even religious Democrats tend to accept theological tolerance -- even when that tolerance is theologically inconsistent. The GOP has a much stronger claim to the Christian fundamentalist vote.

Tribe

Humans support their Tribe. It is especially hard for a member of a powerful Tribe to see its time is passing. The GOP is the Party of the White Tribe, and in particular of the White Male Tribe. The Democratic Party has a much blurrier Tribal identity, but if you're non-White or Gay or Lesbian it's a natural home.

The GOP and Dems are separated by chasms of Fact, Faith, Values and Tribe. The chasm of Fact seems easiest to cross, but often choices of Fact serve needs of Faith, Values and Tribe. Good persons, by reasons especially of Faith, Values and Tribe, may feel my party is less than sane.

Obama and the underwear bomber

I’ve not written much about the underwear bomber, mostly because the inanity of the public discussion is so depressing.

Schneier, as usual, has the most rational coverage. He points out that even our inevitably imperfect security measures do increase the challenges of bomb preparation, and thus the probability that an attack will fail. So even though metal-free recto-vaginal or intra-abdominal bombs can bypass millimeter-wave scanners or backscatter x-ray these devices will still increase the cost of a successful attack. (Though there are probably more cost-effective measures to increase security.)

One lesson from this attack is that we need to make an understanding of positive predictive value a requirement for high school graduation. It’s also clear that the controversial ridiculous fashion for teaching Latin is a major distraction from a desperate need to teach logic.

Lessons aside, I think the response of the Obama administration is interesting to watch. They clearly know that there’s not much that could have been done to stop this attack, and they know that they have to placate our spine-free hysterical nation. More interestingly, it looks like they’re trying to use this to attack the incompetent intelligence network we’ve inherited – even though, in this case, even a very good network would have failed.

It’s the equivalent of jailing a mobster for tax evasion when you can’t get ‘em for murder and mayhem.

PS. I’m so glad our heroic savior is a leftie foreigner who makes “low budget films”. At least we’ve been spared the usual celebratory histrionics.

Update: On further reflection, inspired by a polite comment, I was a bit harsh on the teaching of Latin. I do think there are substantially better uses of educational resources, but "ridiculous" was unmerited.

Update b: Schneier has summarized his recommendations. Perfect, as usual.

American spine movement: Brooks signs up

Maybe it's the influence of Gail Collins, maybe it's disgust with the GOP's institutionalized hysteria, maybe it's just chance, but David Brooks wrote a largely sensible editorial today.

He's effectively joined the American Spine Development Association, a now bipartisan movement to bring a smidgen of the courage of past generations to our cowardly modernity.

Perfection is not an option. Planes will blow up. An America with a spine will lose fewer planes and spend less than eternity at war. Spineless America will elect Sarah Palin.

Spine is good.

America, please grow a spine

Another mentally ill al Qaeda cannon fodder has tried to blow up an airplane. It's encouraging that they're still scraping the barrel to recruit suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, in America, there are rumors that we'll have to forsake electronics and all motion or access to personal goods for the last hour of flight. At one point it was rumored that we'd have to go without a book for the "last hour". We might as well scratch all children and many adults with medical, cognitive or psychiatric disorders from flying.

Oh, and I love they way they say "last hour" as though planes never spend 1-2 hours circling the airport or waiting for a gate.

Meanwhile anyone who's seen a movie or read a book about smuggling or prisons is waiting for the first bomb smuggled in by body cavity - or surgically embedded into the abdomen. The next generation of scanners will have to incorporate a rectal probe.

The TSA administrators can't be as stupid as they look. They must know there's really no practical way to secure an airplane (train, bus, public space) against a truly competent and determined attacker. The best we can do is balanced risk mitigation. As Schneier has told us so many times, the big changes post 9/11 were to secure the cockpit door and look to the courage of passengers.

So if the TSA administrators aren't stupid, where do these regs come from? They come from legislative pressure. Now, many of our legislators are stupid, but not all of them. So why do they do this?

Because they know if a plane blows up and they didn't max out on security theater they'll be out of office - because we American voters are who we are.

We gotta stop this. Voters and legislators alike need to grow an American spine -- before our fear and stupidity drives us off the deep end of history.

Update 12/29/09: Signs of vertebral development. The absurd early responses have been dropped. Also, rectal bombs have already been used in Saudi Arabia.

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The magical bomb detecting wand saves Iraqi police

When you read this story, there are 3 things to keep in mind.

The first is that US money, directly or indirectly, pays for these “wands”.

The second is that policemen who discover explosives have a high risk of sudden death.

The third is that Iraqis don’t, by and large, like dogs.

Emphases mine.

Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless – Rod Nordland - NYTimes.com

BAGHDAD — … Iraq’s security forces have been relying on a device to detect bombs and weapons that the United States military and technical experts say is useless.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq…

… the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles…

… The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives…

… Aqeel al-Turaihi, the inspector general for the Ministry of the Interior, reported that the ministry bought 800 of the devices from a company called ATSC (UK) Ltd. for $32 million in 2008, and an unspecified larger quantity for $53 million. Mr. Turaihi said Iraqi officials paid up to $60,000 apiece, when the wands could be purchased for as little as $18,500. He said he had begun an investigation into the no-bid contracts with ATSC.

Jim McCormick, the head of ATSC, based in London, did not return calls for comment.

The Baghdad Operations Command announced Tuesday that it had purchased an additional 100 detection devices, but General Rowe said five to eight bomb-sniffing dogs could be purchased for $60,000, with provable results.

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”..

… ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

To detect materials, the operator puts an array of plastic-coated cardboard cards with bar codes into a holder connected to the wand by a cable.

… the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them.

If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth…

Effective dog teams: $60,000. Plastic wands: $60,000,000. A thousand fold cost difference, and the wands, of course, do nothing.

It is very likely that good portion of that $60 million sits in the bank accounts of “Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri” and other Iraqi decision makers. Assuming the wands cost $100 each to make (probably much less) ASTC’s owners must also be rather wealthy now.

On the other hand, use of these wands must have reduced the death rate of Iraqi police over the past year or two. The police may not be as gullible as one might think.

The worst is that this is probably not the worst.

Update: The Onion's monument to human stupidity.

The economics of modern military action

In the modern world, large scale human military operations are quite expensive (emphases mine) ...

Kristof - More Schools, Not Troops - NYTimes.com

... For the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there ...

The 1 soldier/20 school ratio is a reflection of both the cost of the soldier and the low cost of Afghan construction. It does not include the cost of operating the schools but the point is well made. Our army of one is very expensive.

This is curious because other military actions are getting cheaper. The cost of destruction (aka "cost of havoc") has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries. Even very poor people can afford very effective weaponry, command and communications infrastructure, spy satellites, and even weapons of mass destruction (an interesting variant is the low cost of climate engineering blackmail).

The low cost of certain kinds of military action may dramatically increase the cost of occupation-class operations, particularly those where soldiers can make choices. Separately, soldiering is increasingly a high skills occupation -- and one that's very hard to outsource to a low wage nation. Non-outsourcable high skills occupations are increasingly costly.

Perhaps one of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan will be that no future nation will be able to afford the cost of occupation.

Interesting.

The NYT does not like the Taliban

The NYT has recently published at least 3 articles that deliver pretty much the same message …

• Pakistan Attacks Show Tighter Militant Links
• Remembering Afghanistan’s Golden Age (1964 to 1974)*
• Held by the Taliban - A Times Reporter’s Account. A Five-Part Series by David Rohde

The message is that the modern Taliban have become inextricably linked to al Qaeda and Pakistan. There’s a less clear attempt to argue that Afghanistan is not a hopeless case.

I remember a similar NYT consensus in the build up to the invasion of Iraq, when the NYT jumped on the WMB and especially bioweapon bandwagon. In retrospect the Times was being played by their sources.

That’s not to say this consensus is wrong, but we’d be foolish to forget how this game is played.

I’m very glad Obama is doing his strategic review.

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* My recollection is that in the early 80s Afghanistan was a poster child for impending ecological collapse. It’s a very fragile ecosystem, and the rapid development of the 1970s combined with severe oppression of women had led to extreme population growth and environmental degradation. Climate variation may have also played a role. By the late 1980s and early 1990s Afghanistan was in economic and ecological collapse.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any references that agree with my memory!

This is important. If the Afghan agricultural infrastructure is gone, then it has a very long road ahead.

See also Gordon's Notes- Lester Brown, Julian Simon, the UNFPA, Malthus, and, again, the Food.

In Our Time - The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth

In the 2003 In Our Time explored the cultural history of war: BBC - Radio 4 - The Art of War.

During the programme, one of the guests mentions Karl Pearson an early 20th century social Darwinist and "Professor of Eugenics" [1]. Pearson praised war as the engine of racial fitness and national progress. If not for war, it was said in Pearson's time, "the weak shall inherit the earth" [2].

These memes are with us still, though in the west they are rarely explicit.

[1] Those of us who did med school stats may remember the "Pearson distribution". Same guy.

[2] It's not clear from the discussion if the phrase came from Pearson, but I suspect it was a common usage of the time. Not for the first time I wish there were more IOT transcripts. The "After Our Time" wiki has @50 IOT transcripts, but the blog and wiki was only active for a few months in 2007. Among those few transcripts, incidentally, are early programmes that have been lost, including one featuring Stephen Jay Gould.

Update Feb 17, 2010: The Lost Episodes are now online.

Inmate Kyle Foggo – Creator of the post-2003 torture facilities

It looks like the Obama administration will investigate and prosecute senior CIA officials who broke American law. 

In the meanwhile CIA officials are spinning their stories to the NYT, with usual welter of self-justifications and contradictions.

If you read this somewhat confused NYT article carefully you’ll see examples of those contradictions – in addition to being generally incoherent. In one spot it says waterboards were built on the spot, in another paragraph it says waterboarding had been discontinued when the prisons were built. I

The article reads like multiple leaks with different aims. Some statements seem intended to help Mr Foggo, others to convict him …

Interrogation Inc. - A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists…

… Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed…

… a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor…  provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

… Mr. Foggo .. pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge … and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison … He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official…

… Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye…

.. Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall…

… C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued…

As the investigations proceed there will be more leaks. Eventually a case may be built against Mr. Foggo, but more likely the feds will lean on him, and whoever he implicates, to turn in someone else.

In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

This IOT Program starts slowly ...

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

... In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims - who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia...

... but it picks up speed after the first ten minutes or so when Melvyn Bragg takes control. I knew only the broadest outlines of the story, and the details are amazing. For an outsider it does add some context to the relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The early (and later) days of the Catholic papacy were pretty rough, but the assassinations and wars of early Islam are right up there. It reminds me also of the assassination eras of the American presidency. The conflicts occur on so many dizzying levels -- personal, family, tribe, relation to the Prophet, and proto-nation (but not, interestingly, theological except in the sense of who rules a theocracy).

The real mystery, which this one programme can't address, is how these squabbling tribes seized and held a vast empire -- before it became a vast and coherent civilization.

It's well worth a listen for anyone with an interest or stake in the Middle East. I do hope Obama gets some moments with IOT.

This is the third from last episode of what must be at least the sixth season (it's curiously hard to find out from the site how many seasons there have been.) Melvyn says he'll be back next year. It's been a great season as always, but listening to this episode I recognize that the past season has felt relatively sluggish.

In retrospect I think Melvyn has mellowed too much. He needs to get a bit tougher on his academics, who are prone to wander and miss the fundamentals. It's a fine road to travel -- some of them are rather nervous and might break down under harder handling, but the show works best when he's riding herd with the occasional flick of the whip.

Writing this post I noticed something new. There's a blog called "After Our Time". Unfortunately it appears to have expired in October 2007. It would be nice to see a revival of that.

Most obvious comment on that super-secret CIA program

When I read the WSJ’s claim that CIA’s secret program was about assassinating al Qaeda leaders my first thought was “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for 8 years?”.

We’ve been using drones to assassinate alleged al Qaeda operatives for years. There’s no way that could be a top secret super-controversial we’re-not-sure-we-told-the-President program. The thought has occurred to others …

New Info Brings More Questions On Secret CIA Program | TPMMuckraker

… a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qaeda operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has...

… the US military has openly been trying to get Osama bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

Nuking al Qaeda leaders would be controversial. Assassinating them – not so much.

The WSJ article is some kind of smokescreen.

An old mystery – why did Saddam block UN inspections?

We now all know that Cheney and Bush were looking for a reason to invade Iraq even as the UN sanctions were crumbling. We also know that Saddam really didn’t have any WMDs to hide.

So why did Saddam prevent UN inspectors from doing their work? He might have held off the US invasion and waited out the rapidly crumbling UN sanctions. Why did he give Bush the excuse he was looking for?

One 2003 theory was that Saddam thought he had weapons of mass destruction – he thought he had something to hide. Maybe his military was lying to him to save their own skins. By 2006 the public theory was that that Saddam himself knew there were no WMDs, but he was  hiding this fact from many of his aides – for fear of revealing weakness to Iran.

Today an FBI report provides more details. I found Saddam’s comments on a “pact with a US enemy” persuasive …

Newly released FBI reports describe Saddam Hussein's reasons for refusing UN inspectors to enter Iraq | World news | guardian.co.uk

Saddam Hussein remained preoccupied with the threat from neighbouring Iran as the US-led invasion loomed and would have sought a security pact with the US if UN sanctions were lifted, he told an FBI interviewer in his jail cell before his execution.

In more than two dozen interviews and casual talks, the deposed Iraqi leader told FBI questioners that he refused to allowed UN inspectors to re-enter the country because he feared they would reveal to his chief adversary Iran the severely degraded state of Iraq's weapons capability.

Saddam, whom the successor Iraqi government hanged in December 2006, also denied having any connection to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida, and said that if he wanted to join forces with a US enemy, he would have sought a pact with North Korea or China…

… The reports were released by the National Security Archive, a Washington group that obtained them from the FBI. The reports contain a few deletions, and one interview, from May 1, 2004, was redacted in its entirety…

.. He said that during the run-up to the US invasion in March 2003, he kept up his bluster about weapons of mass destruction in order to appear strong in front of Iran. Saddam said he believed Iran intended to annex majority Shia areas of southern Iraq, and saw the country as the greatest threat to Iraq. He said he viewed the other Arab countries in the region as weak and unable to defend against an attack from Iran. He said that he refused to allow UN inspectors to re-enter the country not because he still possessed prohibited weapons of mass destruction (he ordered the stock pile destroyed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war) but because he wanted Iran to believe he did.

"Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq," the report of a June 11, 2004 interview states.

Asked how Iraq would have dealt with Iran if the UN inspections and sanctions were ended, he said he would have sought a security agreement with the US. Piro agreed such an arrangement would have benefited Iraq, but said the US would not quickly have made such a pact. He told Piro he wanted a more friendly relationship with the US, an ally during the war with Iran, but that the US "was not listening to anything Iraq had to say"…

Saddam was definitely evil, but he wasn’t crazy.  Instead Saddam’s big mistake was thinking that Cheney/Bush were as calculating as he was, when, in reality, they were … crazy.

A good thing happens: fiber optic connections to the Horn of Africa

We’ve had a bit of a good news deficit lately, though there’s no doubt things could be (much) worse.

So this bit of good news is most welcome. Among other things it’s potentially a significant business opportunity for Minnesota’s large Somali and Ethiopian communities.

Emphases mine.

Economist.com – June 2009

… THE Horn of Africa is one of the last populated bits of the planet without a proper connection to the world wide web. Instead of fibre-optic cable, which provides for cheap phone calls and YouTube-friendly surfing, its 200m or so people have had to rely on satellite links. This has kept international phone calls horribly overpriced and internet access equally extortionate and maddeningly slow.

But last week, in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, a regional communications revolution belatedly got under way when Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, plugged in the first of three fibre-optic submarine cables due to make landfall in Kenya in the next few months. They should speed up the connection of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as bits of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, to the online world. Laying the cable cost $130m, mostly at the Kenyan government’s expense; Mr Kibaki hailed the event for bringing “digital citizenship” to his countrymen.

The new cable will compete with the other two to be welcomed onshore, perhaps later this year. The hope is that the high bandwidth and fierce competition between the three cables will slash costs and help create new business. With a mass of young English-speakers only an hour or two ahead of Europe’s time zones, east Africa should, with luck, be well-placed to compete with India and Sri Lanka for back-office work for Western companies. Broadband, say its promoters, will transform the lives of millions in countries such as Kenya and Sudan, almost as dramatically as mobile telephones have done—all the more so because of the parlous state of east Africa’s more old-fashioned infrastructure, especially roads and railways.

A few call centres have already got a toehold in the market and expect to expand fast when the cables arrive. Security experts say cybercrime and junk mail may increase too. Still, mobile telephones, not internet cafés, will continue to grow the fastest. The number and quality of handsets should rise. In a couple of years even fairly poor east Africans may be getting knowledge, news and entertainment on robust versions of existing Apple iPhone and Palm Pre models. That, in turn, may prove to be a political as well as economic boon, as information gets shared “horizontally”, among people rather than “vertically” via media outlets run by the political and commercial elites.

Rwanda may emerge as a winner. Its president, Paul Kagame, has long identified the internet as a key to his country’s development, offering concessions to software companies setting up there. But Kenya also wants to cash in. It has abolished sales tax on computers and in last week’s budget ended the sales tax on new mobile phones. It has also let businesses write off bandwidth purchases in the hope of dominating the regional internet market. That may make other countries push companies to drop their prices…

There will be problems of course. Stolen infrastructure, corruption, cybercrime, etc.

Even so. Change you can believe in.

Martha, what do you think?

Foreign Policy review on child soldiers

FP takes us to the ugliness behind the hype (via Freakonomics) ...

Foreign Policy: Think Again: Child Soldiers

... Asymmetrical conflicts, however, are another story. Take suicide bombing, which child soldiers have carried out in the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. There is little that trained soldiers can do other than guess that a nearby child is in fact a suicide bomber. In Afghanistan, a 14-year-old was responsible for the first killing of a NATO soldier -- likely just one of the estimated 8,000 child soldiers who do or have worked as part of the Taliban's forces.

Face to face with child soldiers in battle, Western military forces are often befuddled as to what to do. Should they engage, retreat, surrender, or attempt to disarm? The U.S. Army's war manual, for example, offers no guidance on rules of engagement. The British Army only recognized the problem after one of its patrols was captured by child RUF soldiers in Sierra Leone, having been hesitant to attack the under-15-year-olds. Britain later used pyrotechnics and loud explosions in that conflict to induce panic among the ill-trained youngsters, many of whom would simply run away....

Since the US recruits at age 17, we technically employ child soldiers. Most are in Asia and the near East, not in Africa.

Armies use child warriors because they're effective. Much more effective, you may be sure, than I would be.

The conclusion? To end the use of child soldiers, we must first end the most common forms of modern warfare.

Update: Sarah, in comments, points out that technically the US is compliant with current law as long as our child soldiers don't fight (though some have). We violate international law when we prosecute child soldiers as adult war criminals.

The implications of cyber war in an interconnected world

This is the first cyber war discussion I've read that's had anything interesting to say ...

I, Cringely - Collateral Damage

... Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? ... The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain...

Sounds plausible. I'd say we have a problem ...

Obama vs. Cheney is as simple as Good vs. Evil

I really am a shades of gray guy.

Sometimes, though, the shades are pretty extreme.

The Obama vs. Cheney speeches are about as simple as good vs. evil.

No, Cheney's not (yet) a mass murderer. He does, however, want America to travel a road well worn by evil regimes. He champions an evil cause.

No, Obama is far from a saint. He does, however, call on America to remember its nobility.

It's rare to have such a clear choice.

Obama stands firm on closing Guantanamo |World news | guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama today laid out a broad case for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and banning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been condemned as torture – while accusing his opponents of wanting to scare Americans to win political battles.

In a grand hall at the US national archives, standing directly in front of original copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, Obama said the current legal and political battles in Washington over the fate of the 240 prisoners there stemmed not from his decision to close the facility, but from George Bush's move seven years ago to open it...

... , Dick Cheney gave a rebuttal at a conservative Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The former vice-president defended many of the Bush administration policies Obama is now unraveling, and mentioned either "September 11" or "9/11" 25 times.

Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "known ties" to terrorists, an apparent rehashing of the widely discredited Bush administration effort to link the Iraqi dictator to the September 11 2001 hijackers.

... Obama today said that indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and the prison's harsh interrogation methods had undermined the rule of law, alienated America from the rest of the world, served as a rallying cry and recruiting symbol for terrorists, risked the lives of American troops by making it less likely enemy combatants would surrender, and increased the likelihood American prisoners of war would be mistreated. The camp's existence discouraged US allies from cooperating in the fight against international terrorism, he said.

"There is also no question that Guantánamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world," he said. "Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law."

Calling Guantánamo "a mess, a misguided experiment", he condemned the re-emergence of bitter political fighting over the prison and the future of its 240 inmates.

"We will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue," he said. "Listening to the recent debate, I've heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

... He acknowledged that a number of Guantánamo prisoners could not be prosecuted yet posed a clear threat to the US: those who had trained at al-Qaida camps, commanded Taliban troops, pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden and sworn to kill Americans.

"These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States," he said.

He pledged to construct a new legal framework to deal with those prisoners, saying that if they warranted long-term detention the decision should be made not by the president alone but with congressional and judicial oversight...

One day your children may ask, did you stand with evil or with good.

Now is the time you will determine your answer.

Obama's retreat strengthens calls for a Truth Commission

Scanning the NYT this evening, it's not hard to see a consensus emerging. Even those who weren't in favor of an American Truth Commission, like Dowd, have come around.

Obama's retreat on the photos and the tribunals shows this is too tough a problem for him to lead on alone. We do need an investigative committee. We need to know what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their scummy minions did.