The Bush Terror Report: feeding the ignorant masses

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Errors on Terror

Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.

How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."

Credit for uncovering the report's errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.

All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll...

... Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.

---

One of the key memes Strauss taught the Neo-Cons was that the masses were ill-suited to the truth. Better to tell them what will best serve their true interests, interests that only their betters can know.

This meme runs deep in the Bush Administration. They communicate stories to reassure the masses, while preserving "truth" for those (all loyalists) best able to handle it.

Al Gore would say this isn't very democratic. He'd be right.

The New York Times > Washington > U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantanamo Detainees

The New York Times > Washington > U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantanamo Detainees

... But as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legal status of the 595 men imprisoned here, an examination by The New York Times has found that government and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided.

---

A long article, well paired with a WaPo article on the failure of the mission in Iraq. The article is circumspect, but it becomes clear that we've had a plague of deception, some of it self-deception, much of it straightforward lying.

Now when Ashcroft yells "wolf", no-one who matters believes him. Problem is, there really is a wolf.

We need a new government.

Why Bush failed in Iraq: Loyalty first

Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears (washingtonpost.com)

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

---

This is the core of GWB's failings. He values loyalty to his cause above all else. The CPA was staffed by very bright and energetic people -- but their primary requirement was loyalty.

Wrong choice.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history

SpaceShipOne has rocketed into the history books to become the first private manned spacecraft to fly to the edge of space and back.

The craft, built by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, went over space's 100km (62 mile) boundary, said mission control.

---

I never thought they'd be able to pull it off. This craft is going to the Air and Space Museum and the team is going down in history.

Bin Laden will seek to keep Bush in power -- probably win a pre-November attack

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands

Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands

Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian

A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.

He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.

But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.

Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.

The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.



Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.

"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."

In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.

"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.

Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice".

Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate significantly the stress [Bin Laden's] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest he's hiding from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch is that he's fairly comfortable where he is."

The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin Laden's plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity to threaten the US, he said, "I don't think we've laid a glove on him".

"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.

"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."

As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.

The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet Union, he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could be home-made by al-Qaida's own experts, many of them trained in the US and Britain.

Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.

"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said.

"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."

The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which is due to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may try to portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.

The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job in the late 90s.

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."

Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.

He said: "It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: 'What is going on'?

---

Or 100,000.

This is one more in a series of continuing cries of desperation from the apolotical bureaucrats who keep the country running irregardless of the party in power. They cry out only in conditions of great desperation and extraordinary governmental incompetency.

This is one of those times.

Every American must call out as loudly as they can. We have to do everything possible to assemble competent leadership. The danger has been growing with every year; Bush is bin Laden's greatest ally.

The Financial Times gives up on GWB

FT.com | Search | Article

Whether the Osama and Saddam thesis was more the result of self-delusion or cynical manipulation, it - along with Washington's mismanagement of the whole Iraqi adventure - has been enormously damaging.

The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger.

---

One of the interesting aspects of the 9/11 report was that Usama believed a successful strike would help al Qaeda recruit members and facilitate his desire to take control of Saudi Arabia.

So far, he looks prescient. I don't think he's so smart, the problem is we're pretty stupid.

So now the FT has given up on GWB. Next the Economist? But not the WSJ.

The deal Bush made -- with the devil

Salon.com | Torture's dark allure

Few things give a rush quite like having unlimited power over another human being. A sure sign the rush is coming is pasty saliva and a strange taste in one's mouth, according to a French soldier attached to a torture unit in Algeria. That powerful rush can be seen on the faces of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, a rush that undoubtedly changed them forever.

---

Primeval. The experience of being an unassailable alpha.

This story is George Bush's gift to America.

The New York Times had an excellent piece related to the 9/11 commission. They pointed out that most of the story the 9/11 commission related was the result of torturing two or three high level al Qaeda operatives. The real experts in intelligence are very skeptical about these stories. Ironically Bush evidently doesn't believe the 9/11 report -- even though the "confessions" are the product of policies his administration approved and advanced. He sold his soul to the devil, and he rightly distrusts the answers he's getting.

Goethe would have appreciated this.

The ancestry of Word -- there is no new software ...

DigiBarn: Re-visiting and revising the famous Bushy Tree diagram of the lineage of visual computing systems

Charles Simonyi and most of the BravoX team left Xerox for Microsoft as a group, around about 1982 or 1983. The first version of MS Word, which appeared maybe a year later, was essentially just a port of BravoX to MS-DOS. If you read the BravoX manual, you can see that it already has MS Word features such as Styles. MS Word also shows its ancestry in its native file format. Bravo and BravoX stored out files by essentially just dumping the memory heap. This made saving and loading documents very fast, but it also meant that a) the file format was not at all easy to decode, and b) some strange stuff, such as previously deleted text, is stored out along with live text. These idiosyncrasies of the file format are still present in the current version of MS Word.

---

Is there really any new software? Obviously there must be, but it's quite rare. All of the commercial and vertical market s/w I know of has strong roots in very old systems. Word's roots go back 22 years. It was a pretty decent application until about 1995/1997 -- not the best, but tolerable. After 1997 a bad design decision mixed up the original Styles model with a different inline formatting model. Since then Word has been fundamentally broken. (Not that most people care or notice.)

Lots of lessons here, including what happens to software when it diverts from the vision of its designers.

June 19th - celebrating the end of institutional American slavery

The New York Times > National > An Obscure Texas Celebration Makes Its Way Across the U.S.

With events including a small rap contest in Anchorage and a huge festival of African-American heritage in Baltimore, hundreds of thousands of Americans will celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery in the United States effectively ended. With the arrival of an Army ship in Galveston on June 19, 1865, Texas was the last state to learn that the South had surrendered two months earlier. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, the 250,000 slaves in Texas were finally freed.

---

A national holiday celebrating the end of slavery is way overdue. Maybe it would be the first step in America facing its history. National aboriginal genocide day is still in the future.

A serious article on where Microsoft is losing ...

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War

However, there is a less understood phenomenon which is going largely unnoticed: Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

---

Spossky is taking a rather unusual position. Fascinating reading. It has implications for Google's IPO.

As someone who spent hard years building a complex and responsive web based application, I'm very sensitive to latency and UI issues. Spossky has a good point that Microsoft had a good solution set that they abandoned (I remember when they lost interest!) -- but that those solutions are slowly emerging. I think he underestimates Microsoft's ability to use IE to destroy the web, however.

Leadership of the Iraqi terrorists and failure of targeted air strikes (0 for 50)

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders

There's more interesting material in this NYT article than the title suggests.

June 13, 2004
Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

...The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said.

General Ibrahim is still at large, along with at least one other top official who was a target of the failed raids. That official, Maj. Gen. Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah, the former head of the Directorate of General Security, and General Ibrahim are playing a leadership role in the anti-American insurgency, according to a briefing document prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

... A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions."

... In retrospect, the failures were an early warning sign about the thinness of American intelligence on Iraq and on Mr. Hussein's inner circle. Some of the officials who survived the raids, including General Ibrahim, have become leaders of what the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes has been a planned anti-American insurgency, several intelligence officials said.

... An explicit account of the zero for 50 record in strikes on high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the joint staff's high-value targeting cell during the war. Mr. Garlasco is now a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, and he was a primary author of the December report, "Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq."...

... An unclassified analysis prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency and obtained by The New York Times describes Mr. Ibrahim as having "assumed Saddam's duties" as the titular head of the insurgency after Mr. Hussein's capture. It lists General Tilfah, a cousin of Mr. Hussein's, as one of the leaders of former government leaders involved in the insurgency.

General Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war who is now the Air Force vice chief of staff, said in the interview last summer that commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved, General Moseley said.

But raids considered time-sensitive, which included all of those on the high-value targets, were not subject to that constraint, according to current and former military officials. In part for that reason, the report by Human Rights Watch concluded, "attacks on leadership likely resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths from the air war."...

There were conflicting accounts about whether another Iraqi leader who is still at large, Col. Hani Abd al-Latif al-Tilfah, the director of the special security organization under Qusay Hussein, had been a target in the raids. The colonel, the brother of General Tilfah and another maternal cousin of Mr. Hussein, is listed by the D.I.A. as among the leaders of the insurgency.

...Another Iraqi leader from the top 55 list who is still at large and is identified in the D.I.A. report as a leader of the insurgency is Abd al-Baqi Abd al-Karim al Abdallah al-Sadun, chairman of the Baath Party regional command for Diyala...

---

A few interesting notes from this article.

1. Zero for 50 is a crummy record for leadership-target air strikes. I think the article is confused, however, as to whether the total includes all the leadership targets. The article seems to contradict itself.

2. Rumsfeld never declined when asked to authorize a raid that would likely kill over 30 civilians. Many would have been family members.

3. If Human Rights watch says only "dozens" of innocent civilians were killed then the air force did very well -- considering. Fifty times 30 is 1500.

4. The list of former government officials still at large and now running the insurgency is quite impressive. Are they in Falluja? Syria? One day we may know more. Ibrahim, General Tilfah, Colonel Tilfah, al-Sadun ...

5. The NYT is still calling the Iraqi bombers an "insurgency". I guess that's technically correct, but since terrorizing the Iraqi population is their primary modus operandi I'd say "terrorists" works too.

Why we can't extend the retirement age ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Gene loss linked to Alzheimer's

Compared with the gene patterns of young brains, those of people aged from 40 to 70 were much more variable.

Some middle-aged individuals had 'young' genes while others were old before their time.

---

By age 40 some brains are aging quickly. This aging process is disabling for many professions. For workers who's job requires ongoing learning and analysis the aging of their brains means they're struggling long before retirement. Unless we figure a way to slow this process, delaying retirement means years spent bagging groceries -- not working in their original positions.

Yeah, it was only a few bad apples ...

General Granted Latitude At Prison (washingtonpost.com)

A photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees -- one of the most notorious portraits of abuse -- was used as a screen saver on a computer in the isolation area where intelligence officers worked, according to Spencer's statement.

If Bush had had ANY credibility left, it would have been vaporized when he claimed the Abu Ghraib abuses were the indepenent work of a few low ranking soldiers.

He didn't though and never will again.

General Sanchez may walk the plank. Why? Because some senior army officials are furious about the degradation of the US army. It is they who are going to push this to the bitter end. The bitter end is the desk of GWB.

Peak Oil goes mainstream?

The New York Times > Business > An Oil Enigma: Production Falls Even as Reserves Rise

Combined with a survey from the International Energy Agency that shows rising demand, the drop in production at the supermajors offers more evidence that energy prices may stay high for the foreseeable future, said Steven Pfeifer, senior oil analyst at Merrill Lynch.

"The data is starting to say that underlying all this, the supply-demand balance is tighter than we thought," Mr. Pfeifer said. "The maturing geological base is starting to rear its ugly head.

This is an impressively researched article. I wonder how long it took the author to put all the data together, and whether there's a book to follow.

The writing is cautious, even tentative. Berenson builds his case in a lawyerly fashion; each time returning to a core theme. We can measure production, we can't really measure reserves. Nations and companies who estimate reserves have immense short term incentives to exaggerate. Production and reserves used to track one another, now they don't.

He's conservative in part because he's getting into "Peak Oil" territory. A google search will show that "Peak Oil" is a bit of lunatic fringe topic; but as is often the case the lunatics have a point. One of my former Caltech profs has written a book on this topic.

Sometime in the next 5-25 years we'll reach "peak oil production". After that demand must fall to track declining production. Barring world catastrophe or technological revolution, demand will be forced down by price increases. Again, barring technological transformation or world catastrophe, we will move into the post-petroleum world. Time to build those bicycle paths. Not, perhaps, a good time to live in a part of the US where water supplies are limited and air conditioning is a necessity.

This article is a sober accounting of a trend that might be the first preliminary signs of "Peak Oil". I'd expect that this will be a passing warning, that production will rise and reserves will be corrected to again track production. Not Peak Oil yet, but rather the first hint of what will come years from now. The Lunatic Frings is again going mainstream.

Legalizing Torture: Bush must go

Legalizing Torture (washingtonpost.com)

...In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.

There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security."...

... Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.

---

Emphases mine.

If oral sex in the white house inspired outrage, what ought this to inspire?

Bush is guilty of dishonoring and disgracing America.