Hersh makes accusations of the most extreme degree

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004): a Weblog

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

'The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,' the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was 'a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.'

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Hersh has been right too often to be dismissed as insane. Bush has lied too often to be trusted at all.

On the other hand, this accusation is extraordinary.

Now we will see how the Pentagon responds. If Bush had any shred of integrity left, he'd resign.

Bush and the gay marriage ban: crushed in the senate

Top News Article | Reuters.com: "On a 48-to-50 vote, six Republicans broke ranks as proponents of a proposed amendment fell 12 votes short of the needed 60 to end a Democratic procedural hurdle."

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This wasn't even close -- to be a serious threat it needed at least 60 votes. I'd bet many of those voting for it did so knowing there wasn't a chance in heck of it passing -- and thus felt free to earn bennies from Bush.

In the face of a fairly smashing defeat, will Rove reconsider putting this front and center? Rove's goal is to use the gay marriage ban to increase turnout among the religious radical right (I suspect neither Rove nor Bush have much personal devotion to banning gay unions); but I'm sure he was banking on more support in the senate. Rove's secondary goal was to have Kerry and Edwards on record voting against the ban -- but the vote was so lopsided both of them were able to be conveniently absent.

A good day for the good guys.

How to join the dept of homeland security watch list

HoustonChronicle.com - I write badly, therefore I am a would-be terrorist

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This is pathetic, sad, and scary in two big ways. Scary in one way because it illustrates the astounding incompetence of our security apparatus. Scary in another way because of the abuses ahead.

If Bush wins, I'll be taking Greyhound too.

Rankism -- not so silly?

The New York Times > Arts >Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank

Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized against ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism, taken arms against Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed, at various conferences and cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism.

Is it possible there is yet another ism to mobilize against?

Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his life in academia, thinks so, and he calls it 'rankism,' the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of the world unite! — against mean bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry politicians, belittling soccer coaches and arrogant professors.

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The journalist starts off with a somewhat dismissive lead, but provides a bit more reasoned review later in the piece. Scorn it not -- this isn't going to go away.

Most human societies have aligned power and moral superiority. We think of talent, brilliance, charm, strength, physical beauty, good character as things worthy of praise. Moreover, we consider success itself as praiseworthy -- some of us (Republicans, conservative christians) consider all of these things as signs of God's approval, and thus a sign of godliness and goodness.

These common sentiments are better than many alternatives, alternatives such as the anti-intellectual assaults of the Red Guard, the Nazi party, and the Iraqi insurgency (which has been assassinating Iraq's intellectuals). They're better than the revenge of the envious common to revolutionary movements from France to Russia.

But times change. We don't praise luck as much as we do brilliance. And yet what is brilliance, but a form of luck? Luck to have the right genes, luck to avoid disease, poverty, injury, neglect. Luck to have a measure of schooling, to be born in a setting where brilliance was approved.

We are human, and we are unlikely to change our genetically programmed responses to the gifted (lucky) and the powerful. Still, were we all knowing, and all wise, I think we would blend an appreciation for the luck of the gifted with compassion and appreciation for all people fast and slow. An appreciation not that far, really, from the most enlightened teachings of that extraordinary radical, J Christ.

A changing dynamic in Iraq

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraq's Rebellion Develops Signs of Internal Rift

The establishment of the sovereign government may have set in motion a subtle but real shift in perceptions among some Iraqi rebels. Some argue that Mr. Allawi's Baathist past — he was a hard-liner before he ran afoul of Mr. Hussein — is swaying some former Baathists toward loyalty to the new government.

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A separate article describes the return of jihadi to Saudi Arabia -- from Iraq.

I've wondered what deals were done to get Sistani to accept Allawi. Bush was right to stick to the transition date (one decision I never criticized -- because I agreed with it). If the Kurds and Shias can live with Allawi, then he's the key to reassuring the Sunni. The next step to watch is what Allawi does with Falluja. By focusing on "foreigners" there he seems to be preparing for an attack.

I'm Osama bin Laden and I approve this message ...

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose July 11th, 2004 The July 11 Doonesbury is wicked. And so true. If Osama knew how to reelect GWB, he would.

Informed Comment : 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004

Informed Comment : 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004

The US military and possibly Coalition partners have in many cases taken women and children hostage in order to force their male relatives among the guerrillas to surrender. Since this practice is a form of collective punishment and was undertaken while the Coalition occupied Iraq, it is a war crime.

From Der Spiegel:

IRAQ: US soldiers are said to have abused arrested children.

More than hundred children have been detained in Iraqi prisons--including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to information provided by the international red cross. According to the TV magazine show "Report" Coalition troops are may also have abused children and young people. "Between January and May we registered altogether 107 children, during 19 visits at six different prisons", the spokesman of the International Red Cross (IKRK), Florian Westphal, said in a Geneva interview with the SWR magazine "Report Mainz". She said that these places of detention were controlled by coalition troops. The number of the children imprisoned held could also be higher, according to Westphal. In addition, the TV magazine reported references and testimonies, according to which US soldiers in Iraqi prisons also abused children and young people.

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I'd seen mention of this as an aside earlier. Guerilla's fight from home, and frequently fight as a family. They may even consider such tactics to be harsh, but rational.

For the rest of us though, war crime sounds about right.

A new world of vendor lock-in: encryption authentication of batteries

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

NEC's 'smart' batteries: invitation to monopolistic DMCA nightmare

NEC has announced that its batteries will have cryptographic authentication schemes to prevent 'low-quality counterfeits.' Jason Schultz comments on the way that the DMCA turns such a sytem into a license to screw your customers by shutting out competitors who make cheaper batteries:

The software will be introduced in Japanese digital cameras by year's end and is expected to be used in 50 million units by 2007. The software is ideal for use in mobile phones and batteries, but NEC Electronics is also considering extending this technology to 'smart' keys, printers and ink cartridges, as well as bundling the technology into hardware options.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, software-based authentication is the wave of the future. And now, with the DMCA, a near-monopoly! Future, here we come.

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Lock-in is binding customers to your products. Microsoft built its monopoly on binding customers to their proprietary (now DMCA protected) file formats.

In the old days hardware lock-in required patented oddball connectors. Now it's much easier and cheaper. To be fair I think this would have happened without the DMCA; the DMCA just makes it illegal to break the encryption.

update: Thinking about this a bit more, the best guide to what we'll see is HP ink jet printers. HP printer heada are keyed (by patent) to their printers. HP can (and does) give away the printers; they make their money on the consumables.

Cheap encrypted interfaces for physical devices extends this strategy. Ultimately many consumer electronic devices may be very cheap or free -- but we'll pay for them through the batteries. The battery manufacturer has complete control over product life-cycle -- if they stop making the batteries the device becomes garbage.

Any sort of consumable that's bound by encryption keys to a dependent device may have the same effect. If cars end up being run by fuel cells ...

I don't think we can imagine where this will end up. The only thing that will slow this down are (I hope!) high fees for use of this (certainly) patented innovation.

Ashcroft delcares translator's expose to be a "state secret" ...

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Bush Administration Silences FBI Whistleblower

Boston Globe: Translator in eye of storm on retroactive classification. Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said, she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English.

Edmonds, 34, who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi, said she quickly reported the mistake to an FBI superior. Five months later, after flagging what she said were several other security lapses in her division, she was fired. Now, after more than two years of investigations and congressional inquiries, Edmonds is at the center of an extraordinary storm over US classification rules that sheds new light on the secrecy imperative supported by members of the Bush administration.

In a rare maneuver, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered that information about the Edmonds case be retroactively classified, even basic facts that have been posted on websites and discussed openly in meetings with members of Congress for two years. The Department of Justice also invoked the seldom-used ''state secrets" privilege to silence Edmonds in court. She has been blocked from testifying in a lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and was allowed to speak to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks only behind closed doors.

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The now top secret, for your eye's only, must be removed, letters are here.

This administration is getting whackier all the time. Maybe Moore isn't as much of a crackpot as I'd assumed.

The July surprise: bin Laden on demand?

The New Republic Online: July Surprise?

... This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar ... But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."...

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington."... according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

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Emphases mine. Sweet. The New Republic may have a serious scoop. If true it's an incredible sign of how ruthless and desperate the Bushies are. Can they be driven only by the lust for power, or do they fear what might come out if they lose?

To assign capture of America's deadliest enemies to their electoral calendar ... I wouldn't have given this much credence two years ago, but the Bush regime has a knack of making ridiculous conspiracies seem all too plausible.

Department of Homeland Security: Don't use IE, try another browser

US CERT: UN-Cast News Wire

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).

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Firefox (Win/Mac), Mozilla (Win/Mac), Opera (Win/Mac), Camino (Mac only), Safari (Mac only) are good alternatives. I use FireFox on PCs, and Safari on my Mac. FF and Safari have a lot in common. Apple is tying Safari improvements to the operating system, so when I stop upgrading my aging iBook I expect I'll switch to using FireFox on both platforms.

Blogger tips: too cute, but useful

Blogger Knowledge

Millionaires and Billionaires against Bush

ob4.org

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This web site is the creation of Mitch Kapor of spreadsheet fame and some of his silicon valley colleagues. I don't know all the contributors, but I suspect they're worthy sorts and quite wealthy. They're also the sort of people who tended, historically, to be relatively apolitical or libertarian.

They are united, however, in the belief that GWB is a disaster for the nation and the world.

The site may or may not be interesting, but it's noteworthy as a marker for a societal transformation.

Building a Militia - in America

Boing Boing: Thousands volunteer to spy on fellow citizens

Time has good news for nosy, racist jerks: the Dept. of Homeland Security is enlisting 400,000 people to report on suspicious behavior in public areas.

After the [training] session in Little Rock, two newly initiated Highway Watch members sat down for the catered barbecue lunch. The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot 'Islamics' on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. 'I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics.' Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: 'You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people.

That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

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Blackshirts, Red Brigadiers, Klansmen ... they'd recognize this program. It's how you build a militia. In this case, one that votes Republican.

Rumsfeld's Foreign Legion

From the June 26th Economist:

The award of a $293m contract to a British soldier of fortune, Tim Spicer, has also brought thousands of western and Asian mercenaries under America's wing and beyond the reach of Iraqi law.

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If there are 3,000 mercenaries, this comes to $100,000 each -- about right for a year's service. Very odd that this has gotten no press. Sounds like Rumsfeld's alternative to the draft is a new American Foreign Legion.