Hack Attack

Maybe it's just me, but I have been freaked out by this Wired article on how Russian hackers - apparently operating with the Kremlin's authorization and probably its assistance - used a "cyberattack" to nearly destroy Estonia's IT infrastructure. It's an incredible story, seemingly out of science fiction, and yet it just happened a few months ago - and could happen again at any time.

Never before had an entire country been targeted on almost every digital front all at once, and never before had a government itself fought back. "The attacks were aimed at the essential electronic infrastructure of the Republic of Estonia," Aaviksoo tells me later. "All major commercial banks, telcos, media outlets, and name servers — the phone books of the Internet — felt the impact, and this affected the majority of the Estonian population. This was the first time that a botnet threatened the national security of an entire nation."

Welcome to Web War one.

Reaction on the Street

The Onion's man-on-the-street provides his reaction to the passage of the new warrantless surveillance law:

You won't need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you a**holes because you said you were against sh*t like this.

President Palpatine?

The decider is a decidin’ again.

From an email forward to a friend, I was recently made aware of this executive order. Chris at New Patriot posted last week.

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization
Efforts in Iraq Bush has issued his scariest executive order yet. It's probably
the scariest executive order issued by any American President--
ever.

The new order allows the government to seize the assets and property of anyone that interferes with its Iraq policies. Some old-line republicans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Pat Buchanan, and others are putting forward the idea that Bush will stage some sort of false flag event to push the US into a police state.

Please read.

I urge you to raise your voice to impeach.

As Chris indicated in a separate email about this item, “Banning protests isn't exactly what he is doing. He is making the price of dissent - of any kind - exorbitantly high.”

Hold on kids, the remaining 500+ days look like they’ll be pretty scary.

Why Did Rumsfeld Want the Terrorists to Win?

In the Times/International Herald Tribune, we learn today that

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan was aborted at the last minute after top officials in the Bush administration decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

Apparently, Rumsfeld concluded hat the mounting scale of the operation - which a "former senior intelligence official" (jokingly?) called the "the invasion of Pakistan" - would have damaged or destroyed our relationship with Pervez Musharraf.

Good conclusion, Rummy. Should we kill or capture the figures behind a mass murder of 2000 Americans on 9/11 and of countless others around the world before and since that awful day, or should we continue to coddle a man who has since cut a deal with his Islamists, who facilitated the proliferation of atomic technology throughout the world, and who is, after all, a military dictator?

Why does the Bush Administration hate America? And why do the Republicans still get any credibility on national security?

The Compleat Angler

The Washington Post is running a four-part series on Vice President Cheney's place in the White House. As you'd expect, it's profoundly chilling stuff, and well worth the time it takes to read and digest.

In league with a network of aides throughout the government, and buttressed by David Addington, his lawyer, Cheney has made himself into the most powerful veep ever. The first two parts of the series detail his role in the War on Terra, from developing the warrantless wiretapping program to making torture acceptable. Through it all, Cheney - whose Secret Service code name is "Angler" - has waged total bureaucratic warfare, unremittingly punished his enemies, taken advantage of the incompetence and stupidity of officials such as Alberto Gonzales, exploited the same traits in the president, and ended up advancing policies which actually diminish American power and status. We are weaker, not stronger, thanks to Cheney's machinations.

And even though almost all of it occurred in secret, it all of this directly concerns the average citizen. For as Scott Horton reminds us, torture matters not only because the government can now do it to captured al-Qaeda operatives, but because they can do it to us - U.S. citizens caught up in events beyond our control.

In the early days in Afghanistan, two Westerners were picked up with what were believed to be Al Qaeda or Taliban units. They were a kid from California named John Walker Lindh and a young Australian kangaroo skinner named David Hicks. As an act of political largesse directed by Dick Cheney, the man who runs our secret government, Hicks was released from Gitmo and returned to Australia. Lindh, however, didn’t have it so good. A decision was made to make an example of him. So he was sentenced to 20 years without parole by Judge T.S. Ellis III in a case prosecuted by Paul J. McNulty, a man who later made his reputation in the U.S. attorney scandal, and now faces suggestions of perjury and lying to Congress. At the time, I was told repeatedly that prosecutors were frantic to secure a plea bargain because they knew that Lindh had been tortured and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was deeply implicated in the decision to torture him. In other words, torture didn’t start in Gitmo or among some grunts in the field and then spread. In fact perhaps the very first victim was a young American citizen, and the decision was reached right at the pinnacle of power and then hammered down on people out in the field who reacted with disbelief upon hearing the instructions given.

Freudian Slip

Economist David Henderson finds that the Vice President recently made a telling misstatement in a recent address to graduating West Point cadets:

Near the end of his speech at the United States Military Academy commencement, Mr. Cheney stated:

"On your first day of Army life, each one of you raised your right hand and took an oath. And you will swear again today to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is your vow, that is the business you're in."

Well, not quite. Here is the actual oath that newly minted officers in the U.S. Army take:

"I (insert name), having been appointed a (insert rank) in the U.S. Army under the conditions indicated in this document, do accept such appointment and do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God."

See the full post for Henderson's analysis of this little glitch. I love things like this, or Bush's oblique reference to the Dred Scott decision in a debate in 2004: they're such great windows into the depraved souls of these fine politicians.

(Via Economist's View.)

Peace, Love, and Understanding

The pinkos at the Economist's Global Intelligence Unit joined with some other peaceniks at various other think tanks and dandelion-weaving cooperatives to develop a new "Global Peace Index," which ranks every country in the world by its peacefulness, as measured on a zillion factors such as "Level of distrust in other citizens," "level of violent crime," "military capability/sophistication," and political corruption, as well as all sorts of demographic data.

Do I even need to say that the good ol' U S of A comes off badly in the overall rankings? We sit at 96, a notch above Iran but below Turkey, Cambodia, Serbia, et cetera. It's no surprise that Iraq comes in dead last, or that Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan compose the top five.

Idiots in Charge

I hate to break this news to my wife over a blog, but that's it, honey; we're never sending our girls to any public school ever - or at least none in Tennessee.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

...

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

“I was like, ‘Oh My God,’ “ she said. “At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out.”

Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation “involved poor judgment.”

What a bunch of complete, utter morons. I hope the teachers have to pay the students' counseling bills.

National Security, Part II

The sniping between Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and the White House over National Guard assistance to Greensburg - destroyed last Friday by a giant tornado - has been nauseating and, you gotta think, totally predictable.

It's largely the administration that's ratcheted up the rhetoric, with Tony Snow using the press secretary's lectern to channel The Secret by saying, "If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it." Down in the trenches, the wingers think the Democrat Sebelius is a lefty loon out to make the preznit look bad (who wouldn't want that?), exploit others' suffering for her own political gain (see "9/11, responses by Bush to"), and generally fumble her duties.

The Times, sticking to the facts, ma'am, reports that

In Kansas, the National Guard is operating with 40 percent to 50 percent of its vehicles and heavy machinery, local Guard officials said. Ordinarily, the Guard would have about 660 Humvees and more than 30 large trucks to traverse difficult terrain and transport heavy equipment. When the tornado struck, the Guard had about 350 Humvees and 15 large trucks, said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general. The Guard would also usually have 170 medium-scale tactical vehicles used to transport people and supplies — but now it has fewer than 30, he said.

And it's not the shortages per se that matter, but the fact that apparently much of this kind of equipment was "pre-positioned" in places that made it harder and slower to get it to Greensburg.

And yes, so while it's terrible that the citizens of that ruined town had to wait and suffer while the rain destroyed what the wind hadn't, I'm worried more about what might happen if there was a major terrorist attack in the U.S. right now. With so many National Guard troops, and so much of their equipment, off fightin' terra in Iraq, who would keep the peace, hunt for survivors, bag the corpses, and move the rubble if, god forbid, we something even a fraction as big as 9/11 occurred now?

If al-Qaeda believes in "hitting them when they're down," they must be cocking a fist right now. Who'd have thought that Bush's policies would become their best force multiplier?

National Security, Part I

Writing at Political Animal, Kevin Drum makes an excellent point: contra the statements of the administration, American withdrawal from Iraq will likely lead quickly to the destruction of al-Qaeda in Iraq:

If we leave Iraq, the country is unlikely in the extreme to become an al-Qaeda haven. Partly this is because it's rage at the American presence itself that provides a big part of the fuel for AQI's growth. Our withdrawal would eliminate that source of rage and devastate AQI's ability to continue its recruiting. Partly it's because, as we're seeing in Anbar province right now, even Sunni extremists don't like AQI. Left to their own devices they'll kill off AQI jihadists in order to protect their own tribal turf. And partly it's because once we withdraw, non-Kurdish Iraq will be free to finish its inevitable transition into a Shiite theocracy — a transition that's sadly unavoidable whether we stay or not. Yes, this transition will be bloody, but in the end Iraq will almost certainly be composed of the Kurdish north, which has no use for al-Qaeda; the remaining Sunni sheikhs, who also have no use for al-Qaeda; and the victorious Shiite central government itself, which likewise has no use for murderous Sunni jihadists on its soil. Between the three of them, AQI isn't likely to last a year.

I'm not a big fan of internecine combat (apart from Mets-Yankees fans), but I've gotta say, having the Shi'ite murderers kill the al-Qaeda murderers sounds fine to me.

Happy May Day

It's May 1, so the Turks are rioting, the Finns are drunk, and the Americans are still suffering with the worst president ever - nothing "may be" about it. To that last point, see Greg Mitchell's summary of how the New York Times analyzed W's "Mission Accomplished" speech four years ago today. It ain't pretty. From an editorial:

From the moment that Mr. Bush made his intention of invading Iraq clear, the question was never whether American troops would succeed, or whether the regime they toppled would not be exposed to the world as a despicable one. The question was, and still is, whether the administration has the patience to rebuild Iraq and set it on a course toward stable, enlightened governance. The chaotic situation in Afghanistan is no billboard for American talent at nation-building. The American administration of postwar Iraq has so far failed to match the efficiency and effectiveness of the military invasion. But as the United States came to the end of one phase of the Iraqi engagement last night, there was still time to do better.

If only.

33 Dead

My maternal grandparents lived in Blacksburg, VA, as did my great grandmother. We used to go there three or four times a year.

I hate that I will now associate that town with this insane shooting.

Times like these, I wish I believed in a specifically designated higher power. But my thoughts and prayers go out to that campus, nonetheless.

The War against the War against Terra

If this article in the Onion didn't stink of how the war with Iran might start, it'd be even funnier:

WASHINGTON, DC—The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that its Counter-Counterterrorism Unit successfully carried out its largest and most complex anti-anti-terror exercise to date, destroying the Washington Monument in a massive explosion that left 122 dead, dozens more injured, and the area around the National Mall a chaotic scene of smoke and debris... While the counterterrorism unit assigned to protect Washington, D.C.'s landmarks was recognized for its "loyal service," Chertoff said the counter-counterterrorism team deserved special praise for having had "such a profound impact" on the future of American security.

The CCU was created in 2004 in response to the lack of terror activity since the Sept. 11 attacks. Its main tasks include raising awareness among the American public of the "myriad unknown threats" that still face the country, while also testing the readiness and effectiveness of the nation's counterterrorism program by exposing agents to real-world scenarios. Last winter, the eight-man Counter-Counterterrorism Unit was prevented from blowing up the Statue of Liberty and from releasing deadly sarin gas at a Los Angeles Lakers basketball game. But sources within DHS said they believed CCU's months of planning and reconnaissance paid off in the latest exercise.

Negotiating with the Terra'ists

In some ways, this news is emblematic of Administration hypocrisy; in other ways, it's a heartening sign of realism:

The senior American envoy in Iraq, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, held talks last year with men he believed represented major insurgent groups in a drive to bring militant Sunni Arabs into politics.

The meetings began in early 2006 and were quite possibly the first attempts at sustained contact between senior American officials here and the Sunni Arab insurgency... Mr. Khalilzad’s willingness even to approach rebel groups seemed at odds with the public position of some Bush administration officials that the United States does not negotiate with insurgents. It was not clear whether he had to seek permission from Washington before engaging in these talks.

Of course, now Khalizad is leaving Iraq to take over John Bolton's old job at the U.N.

Fear Everything

The war on terra continues. Terrorism expert Bruce Schneier reports that the FBI is "warning" that terrorists could use school buses as weapons. Only, they're not: "'There is no plot. There is no threat. And parents and children can feel perfectly safe,' FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told FOXNews.com."

Boing Boing's resident science-fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, rightly scoffs:

On the subject of "scary-story-but-nothing-to-worry-about," here are a couple from me:

* Osama bin Laden might recruit suicide bombers who fill their colons with Semtex and undetectable shards of broken glass. These anus-bombers might blow up airplanes with their explosive assholes, killing everyone on board. We should all get a thorough, deep rectal exam prior to boarding, starting right now.

* Terrorists could infiltrate the world's car companies and manufacture large, fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers. Once America has gone all SUV, the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to polar melting and global warming, causing devastating hurricanes through the southwest, killing and displacing millions of Americans. Ban car companies now, or the terrorists have won.

Michael Savage = Big Jerk

Monday, the Minnesota Monitor's Abdi Aynte, a Somali-American journalist, broke the story about the six imams who are going to sue U.S. Airways for discrimination after they were kicked off a flight last fall for doing crazy imamish stuff like praying.

Being a good journalistic outlet, the Monitor sent the story around as a press release. In response Michael Savage, the notorious and idiotic right-wing radio host, offered this comment: "You and they should be deported for taking advantage of this great nation."

This is so horribly dumb (not to mention borderline racist) that I can hardly comment. "Taking advantage"? They didn't slip some roofies into the nation's beer, for crissakes - they were unfairly prevented from flying based on paranoia about funny-looking guys who don't keep their prayin' to the churches.

Aynte wrote a good response, though:

It’s offensive and reprehensible because Savage seems to suggest that I -- along with the six imams whose story I have covered accurately and professionally from the beginning -- don’t belong in this country. It’s a protectionist attitude at its worst, coupled with deep-rooted resentment against immigrants and people of color.

I left my native Somalia because of a protracted conflict and to escape physical and emotional injury. To have a radio personality with so many listeners inflict a similar injury, in the land where I sought refuge, is frightening.

Since coming to this country barely six years ago, I have done all the right things. I secured a job to support myself and my family back home, all the while attending school to study what I’ve always dreamed of doing: telling people’s stories.

But I never imagined that becoming a journalist would prompt an influential person like Michael Savage to unleash such hate, bigotry and prejudice against me. Those are not the great American values I’ve seen over the past six years. And Savage’s remarks won’t deter me from pursuing my dream.

Bad, Bad Press

The Washington Post gave my employer some bad, bad press this morning, running an article on the difficulties of tracking terror suspects and supporters which included this paragraph:

Zenab Armend Pisheh, a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., said a member of the cell asked her to wire more than $5,000 so the defendants could go to Pakistan in 2003 to attend an al-Qaeda training camp. "He said it had to be a woman because sisters don't get caught -- brothers get caught if they send money," Pisheh said in a statement to British investigators.

Trouble is, that person has never been a Carleton student. The Post says they'll fix the text soon. Perhaps a call to the Registrar or to public relations could have straightened it out. I'll bet one dollar (Canadian) that they meant Carleton University in Ottawa. You know how they are up there - always wiring their devalued cash around the world.

Going after Dick

I don't know about you, but I think the Taliban's attempt to assassinate Dick Cheney today was a key episode in the War on Terra. I mean, it was utterly half-assed (there was no way the bomber was going to get to Mr. Undisclosed Location), and yet hugely powerful just the same. "Symbolic" is the word the Times uses, and I think that's apt. I mean, if you're a Taliban/al-Qaeda cell commander in Kabul, and you hear that Cheney is in town, isn't it - to borrow the vice president's assessment of another kind of atrocity - a no-brainer to do something like this?