Even a stopped clock.

There’s an article in the NYT about the president authorizing US troops in Iraq to use force against Iranian agents they encounter there. And for the first time in a long while, I think the president said something that wasn’t simply asinine. But what I hope this means is something significantly more aggressive. Iran is currently engaging in a very sophisticated proxy war across the Middle East, with their agents infiltrating and taking over groups and using them for violent confrontations and takeovers. (Hamas against both Israel and Fatah, Hezbollah against all of Lebanese civil society, various agents including al-Sadr in Iraq, Iranian “military representatives” in Syria, and sleeper cells in every country with a Shi’ite population) These guys are using Iraq as a perfect opportunity to set up people who can do all of the things that they don’t want to do openly; a really significant fraction of the violence in Iraq is being driven by these agents, for Iranian purposes. (Mostly, to screw with the US, and to even have a chance to attack US forces, train against them, and evaluate their capabilities in the field)

If Iran is going to fight a “secret war” with the US, the US should feel no compunction about fighting a secret war back. Let me armchair-general for a moment: I would have already issued orders to capture or kill any Iranian agents found in Iraq, and if they have any local cell organizations that aren’t valuable for some other purpose, to simply wipe them out. Iran can’t complain about nasty things happening to its people when it denies that they’re in there; OK, let’s take them up on that. The fewer remaining members of their “intelligence services,” the better.

So for once, I actually think that our president’s call for increased military action in some regard is a good idea. Mark it well, it won’t happen that often.

Published in: on January 26, 2007 at 15:00  Comments (2)  
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If you can buy this…

…I’ve got a prison colony I’d like to interest you in.

A lovely little exchange between our Attorney General and Sen. Specter at the Jan. 18th Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, which were mostly about legislative and judicial oversight of Gonzales’ mass wiretapping program. The main story of that day was that Gonzales basically indicated that the executive would do everything in its power to evade the substance of the order, but the fun part was the conversation that began when Gonzales said, “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away.”

From the fact that the Constitution’s only mention of habeas is that “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it,” he therefore concludes that the Constitution does not grant you this right at all.

I love the sort of fellow we have in the AG’s office. I really wasn’t certain if our administration could find a more odious person than Ashcroft, but apparently if you start with people whose past experience is in writing legal justifications for torture, you can.

Side note: This story appeared on slashdot with a note that it wasn’t being covered by the mainstream press, but only by the indies. However, today’s Washingon Post corroborates the story.

(For those who don’t follow the law, habeas corpus is the right that, if you are imprisoned, you can go to a court and demand that whoever is imprisoning you show that they have the legal authority to do so, e.g. that they’re doing so in order to charge you with a crime. Without it, you can be hauled off to prison “just because” and left there)

Edit: You know, it takes a certain marvelous skill for an Attorney-General to get Bay Area Indymedia and the John Birch Society to simultaneously consider him a dangerous scumbag, and for the same reason.

Edit 2: Here, watch the conversation. It’s a gas.

Published in: on January 23, 2007 at 18:09  Comments (4)  
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The China Game

Geopolitics steps up again — China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon by shooting down one of their own old weather satellites. If you go back to the latest National Space Policy, [old post] you’ll see whence all the emphasis on protecting US “freedom of action in space:” the US and China both see this as a major new battleground for geopolitical-scale military superiority.

There’s a much broader game going on, of course. China has worked out a systematic policy of recruiting any states that don’t get along with the US, e.g. African dictatorships that the US won’t deal with because of extensive corruption, and turning them into client states, with extensive Chinese investment (under very strict Chinese control; they don’t care if they have to bribe some locals, but then they get to run the show themselves) turning into a steady supply of raw materials for China. It also means that embargoes are trivially broken; if the Western coalition embargoes someone, they just start working with China instead. Iran being a key example: they’re building oil pipelines out to Beijing now, with China giving Iran full cover for its nuke program. (Also nice for China since Pakistan is an increasingly weak and flaky ally, and at perpetual risk for coup)

Note, BTW, that North Korea’s continued existence is determined by China. The DPRK gets to keep running in their own peculiar madhouse way, and sell advanced missile and nuclear technology to anyone within the Chinese “family.” It’s a way they can provide somewhat sleazy benefits to their closer partners while providing plausible deniability.

Update: More details from the Washington Post.

Published in: on January 18, 2007 at 11:41  Comments (4)  
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Your unreassuring headline for the day

From the Washington Post: “Secret Panel to Govern Domestic Wiretapping.”

You know, in any normal sort of world, that headline would be rather alarming. But it actually represents a significant improvement from the situation a day ago, where domestic wiretapping was governed by the personal fiat of various individuals in the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security.

Not to say that I believe that those three organizations will miraculously stop all wiretaps (and other forms of surveillance, both focused and broad-spectrum) that are not governed by the FISC.

Published in: on January 17, 2007 at 17:19  Comments Off on Your unreassuring headline for the day  
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Your headline for the day

From the Washington Post:

Bush Urges Troop ‘Surge’ in Iraq: President says al-Maliki’s willingness to commit forces against Shiite militias ensures success.

This time, for sure!

Published in: on January 9, 2007 at 10:39  Comments (2)  
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Ah yes, one more thing…

Trent Lott (R-MS) just got chosen to be minority whip. He’s the former majority leader who stepped down in 2003 after a bit of a fuss over his remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Just so nobody forgets, his exact words were:

“I want to say this about my state — when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

To clarify: Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 with the short-lived Dixiecrat party. This party formed when, at the 1948 Democratic convention, the party decided to put an anti-segregation plank into their platform; a coalition of 35 delegates stormed out and promptly formed the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” more commonly known as the Dixiecrats, and ran their own candidate – Thurmond – on a strong pro-segregation platform. To quote him from this election,

“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

After this party collapsed, he switched to the Republicans, who had swept up control of the South basically by opposing the Democrats on desegregation.1

In his favor, Thurmond changed his mind — by the 1970’s, he repudiated segregation and ultimately did things like support black candidates for federal judgeships, something that Southern politicians of the day were loathe to do. Trent Lott, on the other hand, apparently never did.

So when you start hearing about how the Republican party just chose this guy to be their whip, because they need a good legislative tactician (and he certainly is that), just remember what they’re in bed with.

1 There’s a whole fascinating story here, about the political realignment in the late 40’s that basically reshaped American politics; and I didn’t hear word one about it until I took a fairly specialized course on the history of the American presidency in college. Amazing, what they don’t tell you in school.

Published in: on November 15, 2006 at 18:37  Comments (14)  
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Random tidbits

Newsweek and the Washington Post are hosting a dialogue on the subject of faith and the possibility of coexistence between religions. Contributors so far include the Dalai Lama and Mohammad Khatami. Interesting to hear them speak, and to see people’s responses.

There has been significant progress towards sequencing Neanderthal DNA, and there are hopes of having an almost complete sequence in a year or so. This opens all kinds of doors to looking at what, genetically, makes us human.

On a related note, Slate is running an article about cross-species mating, and in particular why humans could or could not breed with other species. (This was prompted by a recent paper suggesting that humans and Neanderthals may have mated, and that’s the origin of some of our modern cranial capacity genes)

Back in the land of geopolitics, a Chinese sub managed to sneak up on a US carrier group. Apart from ‘s comment that someone O4+ is going to be in seriously deep shit over this, this suggests that they’ve been doing quite well on the technology needed to make highly silent motors and so on. (Whether they did so on their own or “acquired” this technology from elsewhere is an interesting question. China’s military has certainly never suffered from not-invented-here syndrome.)

There’s really a lot having to do with China going on right now. China and Iran are cementing an alliance, with Iranian oil getting ready to flow east. (Question: Anyone have some info as to what the routes are going to be? It looks like every possible path is going to involve some combination of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, which could make for some very exciting places to put oil pipelines. Don’t forget what happened to Russia’s Caspian -> Turkey pipeline, that once upon a time went through Chechnya…) Iran may well have had observers at N Korea’s nuclear test. (Unconfirmed rumors, but wouldn’t be all that surprising if true; those countries have been working hand-in-hand on this for a while.) China is similarly making alliances with a lot of other dubious places that have useful resources, like the Sudan and Zimbabwe, but that the West by and large wants nothing to do with. This certainly makes the notion of sanctions as a weapon pretty much infeasible, since that depends on some sort of unity, and could bring us back towards a bipolar world — if, that is, China’s “burn through the environment as fast as needed to get economic progress” algorithm doesn’t hit a really nasty obstacle in the near future. Which is not something that I would bet against. (Side note: They’re burning through this a lot faster than the US or Europe ever did, because they have a much higher population, and they have old systems in place which turn into a huge social unrest risk if they don’t keep the economy flowing. Add to this an almost total willingness to sacrifice the countryside to protect the cities, again because of unrest risk, and there’s a real problem brewing in China. Not that this would be useful to the furthering of US interests or anything.)

Really, China is in an interesting fix. They got where they are today by being the cheapest producer of all sorts of things. Now other Asian countries, especially in SE Asia, are thinking about competing with them; so what will China do? Keep trying to undercut them, or move into higher-end markets? The latter is more sustainable in general, but it doesn’t necessarily scale to a huge population quite as smoothly, and China has been moving so fast that it hasn’t really had time to transfer the benefits from its previous wave of growth to the population as a whole, so the moderating factor that that would create isn’t available. And trouble from the countryside, local riots, complete collapses of regions due to ecosystem failure, and so on, keep happening more and more often, while people keep streaming into already-overloaded cities. It reminds me a bit of the USSR: it looks awfully menacing on the outside, but if you look at their underlying logistics and infrastructure, there’s a very different thing going on.

Dammit, I’m not nearly enough of a China expert. Perhaps I’m going to need to start on that.

Published in: on November 15, 2006 at 16:10  Comments (2)  
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The Military Commissions Act in action

Read this.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department have told a federal court that permitting lawyers access to high-level Qaeda suspects without tighter secrecy procedures could damage national security by revealing harsh “alternative interrogation methods” used in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas. … “Nobody is trying to keep Khan from speaking with his attorney,” [Justice Department spokesman] Blomquist said. “Rather, the government is asking that the protective order governing the information the detainee shares with his counsel be appropriately tailored to accommodate a higher security level.”

Which is to say: Not only can high-value suspects (or other suspects? Who decides again?) be tortured, but the simple fact that they are tortured is secret, and cannot be examined either in court or even be considered by their attorneys to determine whether there is a matter which can be challenged in court.
In case you were still wondering about the legitimacy of this “Military Commissions Act,” here is your case in point. A person was held by CIA, by implicit admission tortured, and not only can they not raise this in court as an argument against the validity of any confessions thereby extracted, but they may not even discuss the matter with counsel. The government is claiming the unilateral right to tell the suspect that he may not discuss a wide range of issues with his own lawyer, much less with a judge or the military commission which this act describes as a fair trial.
Every procedural safeguard is removed, with torture being effectively permitted without restriction (since any restriction on it may not, by law, ever be actually pressed!) and suspects – which, as we have seen, are falsely accused as often as not – are left to the tender mercies of the CIA and their “agents.” This is the legacy of our president, ימח שמו.

Published in: on November 5, 2006 at 22:18  Comments (6)  
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And another thing

Apparently, as “his frustration rises and his influence ebbs,” our president has been using the word “unacceptable” much more often. The article says:

In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems “unacceptable,” including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea’s claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran’s nuclear ambitions… Having a president call something “unacceptable” is not the same as having him order U.S. troops into action. But foreign policy experts say the word is one of the strongest any leader can deploy, since it both broadcasts a national position and conveys an implicit threat to take action if his warnings are disregarded.

The article avoids (explicitly) saying:

You use that word a great deal. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Published in: on October 13, 2006 at 14:30  Comments (10)  
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News, very quietly

The president just released a new national space policy. This was all done pianissimo; apparently it hasn’t been posted on the White House’s website, or even on NASA’s, but only on the Office of Science & Technology Policy. The policy itself is highlighting things like the right of safe passage of US spacecraft, that nothing should be allowed to interfere with such, and that “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.”

Incidentally, there have been vague rumors recently that China has been field-testing some new anti-satellite weaponry by pointing it at US satellites. I will just guess that this is no coincidence, and that you’re seeing some geopolitics in action here.

Also: The directive for civil space exploration says that NASA’s mandate is to “advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe.” The part about Earth was removed in an earlier version, and apparently got reinstated. (This has to do with whether NASA should research climate — n.b. the GISS-E group that does the current gold standard climate modelling is partially based out of NASA)

Published in: on October 9, 2006 at 13:10  Comments (2)  
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