Gordon's Notes

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Iraq is not Vietnam....

Back to Iraq ...

I had one of those nasty revelations last night, on reading an Economist article on the state of Chechnya. It's obvious in retrospect, and I'm sure it's a common observation everywhere in the world ... except in America.

We've been blinded by our history in Vietnam. So blinded we've chosen the wrong lens for viewing our predicament.

Iraq is not Vietnam.

It is Chechnya.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Back to Iraq 3.0: It's Worse Than You Think...

Anyone who asks me to tell the “real” story of Iraq — implying all the bad things are just media hype — should refer to this post. I just told you the real story: What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America’s making.

This guy was once a relatively optimistic observer. I think he might once have been Republican, or at least an independent.

It sounds like we've lost. Bush, Rumsfeld and their kin have cost us, and Iraq, so very, very much.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Rumsfeld and Fallujah

Key General Criticizes April Attack In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com): "The comments by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, made shortly after he relinquished command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force on Sunday, amounted to a stinging broadside against top U.S. military and civilian leaders who ordered the Fallujah invasion and withdrawal."

Rumsfeld "termination justification" file is about six inches thick.

The Shrill Blog: Martin Sieff Scores the Neocons at Zero for Twenty-One

These are 21 major neocon predictions that have been proven wrong.

Did they make ANY predictions that have been proven correct?

If these guys were ball players they'd have been retired by now. Instead they are making new plans.

Fidelity voted against expensing stock options

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Gretchen Morgenson: A Door Opens. The View Is Ugly.

Most disturbing, some of the biggest fund companies - including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and MFS Investment Management - cast votes with executives and against the views of most investors on the subject of expensing stock options this year.

I want to know how Vanguard voted on this one. I'll write Fidelity and let them know I'm moving my money elsewhere.

The stories not told: Al Qaeda's chemical bombs in Jordan and Pakistan

ABCNEWS.com

In early April, authorities in Jordan disrupted what would have been an even bigger chemical attack. Officials said that terrorists linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi managed to smuggle three cars — packed with explosives, a chemical bomb and poisonous gas — into the capital city, Amman.

Authorities in Jordan estimate that 80,000 people would have been killed if the chemical bomb had gone off at its intended targets — the Jordanian intelligence headquarters, the U.S. Embassy in Amman, and the Jordanian prime minister's office.

'It looks quite thought-through,' said David Siegrist, director of Studies for Countering Biological Terrorism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. 'They have about 800 kilos of explosive and tons of chemicals for oxidation. They also have about a ton of cyanide, which added a little extra pinch to whatever they were about to do.'

The captured leader of the plot, Jordanian Azmi al-Jayussi, told authorities that a Russian scientist had provided the chemical recipe.

And as seen on a tape obtained by ABC News, when Jordanian authorities conducted a test explosion using the same combination of chemicals, with smaller portions, it produced a toxic plume that killed rabbits placed 200 yards away.

'The kind of weapon that al Qaeda procured in Jordan anyone can buy in the United States commercially,' said Clark. 'Anyone in the United States, if they knew the right formula, could make this kind of chemical bomb that would kill thousands.'

The story unfolds as predicted. Technologic expertise is increasingly distributed. The cost of mass murder falls faster than the cost of defense.

The 9/11 attack succeeded because the attackers got lucky -- very lucky. Yes, the US had weak defenses. Yes, we have serious problems with the quality of top and mid-level management at the FBI and CIA. Yes, we have an imcompetent government. Despite all that, the 9/11 attackers ought to have failed -- but they got lucky.

The good guys have had some luck too. These two attacks were disrupted in party by good fortune.

Luck is not a strategy. We need a better government here and better approaches abroad.

Friday, September 10, 2004

America's Problem: The Media?

CJR September/October 2004: Q & A with Howard Dean

When you’re talking about print being worse than broadcast, are you talking about the reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post?

Absolutely.

DeLong has been exploring this theme, but since I don't watch television I was surprised to hear Dean say that network TV was, in general higher quality than print media -- including the "elite media".

I am persuaded, however, that the print media is now very poor quality, and that the NYT is no better than the rest. I don't know why, but I suspect part of the reason is that the overall print media business is less profitable than it once was.

A scarier possibility, may be that corporations, including the print media, are increasingly customer driven. They give consumers what consumers want. Unfortunately, most consumers don't want truth. They want comfort.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Acute Systems Software - TransMac

Acute Systems Software - TransMac and CrossFont

TransMac is an alternative to MacDrive -- a utility for reading HFS+ disks on a PC.

Bush - the adult crimes

Salon.com News | Stung!

In February of this year, Salon interviewed Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, who claims he observed aides to Bush going through his military file in 1997 to remove any embarrassing information, tossing documents in the trash, allegedly the types of documents that might help answer many of the unanswered questions surrounding Bush's Guard service. 'Activities occurred in order to, in my opinion, inappropriately build a false image of the governor's military service,' Burkett told Salon. Burkett first went public with his accusations in 1998 and has told the same story consistently for six years.

Also last February, Salon reported that Bush's mysterious decision in the spring of 1972 to stop flying and subsequently refuse to take a physical exam came at the same time the Air Force announced its Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program, which meant random drug testing for pilots, including Guardsmen.

So he quit becase he'd test positive. No biggy. Yeah, he's a stinking hypocrite, but that's almost a prerequisite for political office.

On the other hand ... a conspiracy to destroy incriminating records ... occurring in the adult Bush era ... That's interesting.

GWB - a spoiled brat with substance problems -- and an adult liar

The New Republic Online: Two-Sided Story

... To me, the most overlooked and most important new detail in these memos comes next. Killian writes, "I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment." It's often forgotten that even if Bush had gone off to Alabama and served honorably by showing up for all his drills, he was still walking out on a sworn commitment he made to the Guard. The government spent a vast sum of money training Bush to become a Texas Air National Guard pilot, a highly coveted position in 1968 that saved Bush from Vietnam, and in return Bush promised he would fly for the Guard for as long as possible...

That's what Killian meant when he advised Bush of "our investment and his commitment." But Killian, the memos show, starts to realize that his moral suasion is useless. Bush has already started maneuvering around him and Killian knows he's getting rolled. "I told him I had to have written acceptance before he would be transferred," he writes, "but think he's also talking to someone upstairs."

In the next memo Bush is "suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered." This is the first time any official document has reported that Bush was suspended for any reason other than simply missing his physical. It's also clear in this memo that Bush has completely abandoned the idea of ever flying again. "Officer has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical," the memo says. Bush even asked for a non-flying assignment. Incredibly, Killian recommends that the Texas spot abandoned by Bush--the one that with Barnes's help Bush had won by leapfrogging ahead of hundreds of other applicants--be filled by a pilot returning from combat in Vietnam. Not only did someone else get shipped off to Vietnam when Bush landed his Guard duty, but once Bush was bored with flying and abandoned his spot, a pilot returning from Vietnam was forced to replace him.

In the final Killian memo, the one with the subject line "CYA" (cover your ass), the commander makes cryptic references to a struggle with his superiors over how much slack to cut Bush, who hadn't been observed in Texas for a year. "Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," Killian writes. According to the Associated Press, Staudt and Hodges are Waleter B. Staudt, the commander of the Texas National Guard at the time, and Lieutenant Cololnel Bobby Hodges, one of Bush's superiors. Staudt, Killian wrote, was "pushing to sugar coat" the evaluation. Killian complains that Bush wasn't around and there's no word from Alabama about what he's been doing. He makes a small concession to the pressure he's feeling from his bosses but refuses a full cover up for Bush. "I'll backdate," he writes, "but won't rate."

Younger Bush was a spolied rich brat with a serious alcohol problem -- and perhaps other substance problems. Young Clinton looks great next to young Bush. Young Gore looks fantastic next to young Bush. Young Kerry ... well, there's no comparison.

How does this connect to Bush today? He's flat out lied, many times, about his service. That's not something to brush off. Clinton lied like any adept politician -- he wriggled and wiggled and looked evasive. Bush lies like a true psychopath -- perfectly and without the slightest hint of guilt.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

DeLong's notes on a Richard Clarke speech

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

"We are not threatened by something called 'terrorism'. We are threatened by a militant subsect of Wahabism." Saudis are Wahabists. Only a few Wahabists are Jihadists. Necessary to preserve and widen the separation between the two.

Al Qaeda's Shurra Council--2/3 of the members of the Shurra Council as of 9/11 are dead or captured, yes. But they have been replaced. We have not captured 2/3 of Al Qaeda's [current] leaders. It has new leaders.

George W. Bush asked for an organizational chart of Al Qaeda so that he could cross people off as they were killed or captured. A very "MBA" way of looking at it, it seemed to me. I remembered "The Battle of Algiers". At the end, the French have caught and tortured and killed all of the urban guerrilla leaders they had identified at the start. And the French had lost the war.

The transformation of Al Qaeda. Breakup into fourteen more-or-less regional pieces. An ideology, not an organization.

Need good law enforcement, good intelligence, and the ability to strike deep when we have a real target. When we don't have a real target, however...

1.3 billion Muslims
200 million of whom believe now (much fewer on 9/12) they support Al Qaeda and its ilk
100,000 Jihadists.

Control and eliminate the third; woo the second; keep the first from drifting into the second.

How good is our intelligence? SigInt as good as it could be: really good. The spy divisions of our intelligence agencies are broken: we have no good spies. Jordanians have spies, British have spies in the Middle East. We don't--not really.

Intelligence analysis the most important. It was intelligence analysis that really fell down on the job in Iraq. The job of the analyst is to say "we don't know" when we don't know.

Oklahoma City: Connection between Terry Nichols and Ramze Usef? Clarke has been unable to disprove the existence of a relationship.

Intelligence analysts need to have open minds, for the world is a really weird place..

9/11 not a failure of intelligence. We told Bush 44 times that Al Qaeda was determined to attack--"Al Qaeda determined to attack inside U.S."

Praise of Clinton's actions in December 1999--that kind of press would have given us a chance in the summer of 2001. Praise of the State Department's Intelligence Bureau...

Since 9/11 very little has been done inside the U.S. as far as Homeland Security is concerned: no raising of the low-hanging fruit vulnerable to Al Qaeda and its ilk...

Why hasn't Al Qaeda struck again?

--We don't know, we guess.

--The FBI: it has done a lot to disrupt Al Qaeda operations inside the U.S.
--Al Qaeda has regionalized itself: not clear anyone thinks they're responsible for mounting American (as opposed to Indonesian, Mediterranean, et cetera) operations.
--They've set themselves a high bar: the only operations they are considering now are those that are even worse than 9/11.

The invasion of Iraq: an extraordinary strategic defeat for the United States, made worse by the war crimes of Abu Ghraib. The pool of people who really hate us is much greater than it was on 9/11.

You ask what could happen that would be really bad? You don't have to say "could": things are really bad. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pervez Musharraf has suffered three assassination attempts this year. The last two regional elections in Pakistan have been won by the Osama bin Laden party. Imagine a successful assassination of Pakistan followed by a Taliban-like takeover.

You want another bad thing? The fall of the House of Saud in a fashion analogous to the fall of the House of Pahlavi twenty-five years ago.

Another bad thing? Iran. Iran had an organizational relationship with Al Qaeda. Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. But our ability to act is constrained by the fact that Bush and Powell and company lied about Iraq.

...

Bush says he is accepting 9/11 Commission's recommendations, but he isn't--not really...

We should not approve of Putin's policies in Chechnya...

Our worldwide credibility is totally shot...

The decisive battles of the War on Terror cannot be fought not in places like Fallujah or the Hindu Kush. It's a war of ideas. If we mobilize our ideas to split the 200 million who think they support bin Laden off away from the 100,000 Jihadists, we win.

Yeah, this is right. Bush is wrong. Sigh.

A brave man writing ...

The New York Times > International > Middle East > School Siege in Russia Sparks Self-Criticism in Arab World

'It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims,' Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the widely watched Al-Arabiya satellite television station wrote in one of the most striking of these commentaries.

These are brave commentators. Truth be told, of course, there have been many non-Muslim terrorists - even in recent years. Ireland, Spain, the US ....

Terrorism has pioneered new depravities recently -- when Muslims happened to have their dark time. The next set of terrorists (from failed nations in Africa?) may or may not be Muslim, but they will dig deeper yet.

Could Cheney be LESS competent than Bush?

RollingStone.com

As vice president, Cheney has been the decisive force pushing America into war. In the inner councils of the administration, it was he who emasculated Colin Powell, cut the State Department out of effective policymaking, foisted fake reports on the intelligence agencies and supplanted the National Security Council. It was also Cheney who placed appointees personally loyal to him, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, in charge of the Pentagon and speckled the warmaking bureaucracy with desk officers culled from neoconservative Washington think tanks -- ideologues with no military experience.

"They were like cancer cells," says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked on the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia desk during the buildup to the Iraq war. "They didn't care about the truth. They had an agenda. I'd never seen anything like it. They deformed everything."

Even within the State Department, officials of Cheney's choosing -- not Powell's -- controlled the key positions when it came to maneuvering the United States into the Iraq war. "Even when there was a show of Defense listening to State, it was just one Cheney operative talking to another," says Greg Thielmann, a former member of the State Department Intelligence Agency. "We were simply bypassed from the start."

Over at Defense, competent intelligence professionals were purged in order to ease the way to war. Douglas Feith, brought in under Rumsfeld to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, applied an ideological test to his staff: He didn't want competence; he wanted fervor. Col. Pat Lang, a Middle East expert who served under five presidents, Republican and Democratic, in key posts in military intelligence, recalls being considered for a job at the Pentagon. During the job interview, Feith scanned Lang's impressive resume. "I see you speak Arabic," Feith said. When Lang nodded, Feith said, "Too bad," and dismissed him.

Bad and worse.

Salon.com News | Sen. Graham: Bush covered up Saudi involvement in 9/11

In his book, Graham asserts that the White House blocked investigations into Saudi Arabian government support for the 9/11 plot, in part because of the Bush family's close ties to the Saudi royal family and wealthy Saudis like the bin Ladens. Behind the White House's insistence on classifying 27 pages detailing the Saudi links in a report issued by a joint House-Senate intelligence panel co-chaired by Graham in 2002 lay the desire to hide the administration's deficiencies and protect its Saudi allies, according to Graham...

...[Q] In the book, you describe being furious with the FBI for blocking your committee's attempts to interview that paid FBI informant. You write that the panel needed the bureau to deliver a congressional subpoena to the informant because he was in the FBI's protective custody and could not be located without the bureau's cooperation. But the FBI refused to help. What happened? And what do you think the bureau was trying to hide?

[A] We had just finished a hearing and had asked various representatives of the FBI to come into a conference room and discuss our strong interest in being able to interview the San Diego informant. It was clear that the FBI representatives were not going to voluntarily allow that to happen, and we had already prepared a subpoena, which I had in my coat pocket. I walked over to the principal representative for the FBI, Ken Wainstein, and I was approaching him with this subpoena, he clasped his hands tightly behind his back. I tried to hand him the subpoena, but he acted as if it were radioactive. Finally he said he didn't want to take the subpoena, but he would get back to us on the following Monday. Well, nobody ever got back to us. It was the only time in my senatorial experience that the FBI has refused to deliver a legally issued congressional subpoena.

Later, the FBI congressional affairs officer sent a letter to [co-chairman] Porter Goss and me, saying, "The administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source, nor did the administration agree to allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on the source." What that tells me is the FBI wasn't acting on its own but had been directed by the White House not to cooperate.

...[Q]Do you believe the White House manipulated the intelligence to persuade the public to back the invasion? "Manipulate" may be too strong a word for you. But it took a request from you and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to get the intelligence community to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on the danger posed by Iraq, a step that would seem an obvious one to take, considering the stakes to the nation.

[A]I am comfortable with the word "manipulate." There was a chapter that did not become known until three or four months ago that occurred in May 2002. Various leaders of the CIA were called down to the White House and told that the White House wanted to have a public document that could be released under the CIA's label but which would make the case for going to war with Iraq. I think one of the reasons they didn't want to do a formal National Intelligence Estimate was because it would be done not by the CIA alone but by all of the members of the intelligence community, and it was likely to reach a different conclusion. At least it would contain dissenting opinions and caveats that wouldn't be in a CIA public document.

[Q]This description of the CIA is one that is under the complete control of the White House, an agency that is not independent but highly politicized.

[A]That's right. It is the expression of the leadership of the intelligence agencies, trying to placate their masters in the administration...

I'd thought similar accusations were too much like conspiracy nuts. I've since learned better. Bush exceeds every expectation. This is beginning to make Watergate feel like a minor exploit.

The last statement does explain why Tenet and Bush were so loyal to one another. Will Tenet start to talk?

Update: The Washington Post media page is covering all the Bush bad news stories; The Kitty Kelly bio, the 60 minutes expose, the Graham book, the deficit, Cheney threatening terrorist actions if Kerry is elected, etc. Wow. What a bright and cheery day it is today.

Bush is caught in the big Lie ...

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Missing in Action

President Bush claims that in the fall of 1972, he fulfilled his Air National Guard duties at a base in Alabama. But Bob Mintz was there - and he is sure Mr. Bush wasn't.

Plenty of other officers have said they also don't recall that Mr. Bush ever showed up for drills at the base. What's different about Mr. Mintz is that he remembers actively looking for Mr. Bush and never finding him.

Mr. Mintz says he had heard that Mr. Bush - described as a young Texas pilot with political influence - had transferred to the base. He heard that Mr. Bush was also a bachelor, so he was looking forward to partying together. He's confident that he'd remember if Mr. Bush had shown up.

I've steered clear until now of how Mr. Bush evaded service in Vietnam because I thought other issues were more important. But if Bush supporters attack John Kerry for his conduct after he volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam, it's only fair to scrutinize Mr. Bush's behavior...

..."The record clearly and convincingly proves he did not fulfill the obligations he incurred when he enlisted in the Air National Guard," writes Gerald Lechliter, a retired Army colonel who has made the most meticulous examination I've seen of Mr. Bush's records (I've posted the full 32-page analysis here). Mr. Lechliter adds that Mr. Bush received unauthorized or fraudulent payments that breached National Guard rules, according to the documents that the White House itself released.

Does this disqualify Mr. Bush from being commander in chief? No. But it should disqualify the Bush campaign from sliming the military service of a rival who still carries shrapnel from Vietnam in his thigh.

So Bush will learn the risk of fighting dirty. It opens the field to serious responses. This will come up in the debates.

Bush is a very good liar. He's a better liar than Clinton, who always came across as phony when he was lying. Bush comes across as genuine and open. Now that's a good liar.