Category: America

A bunch of disturbing trends in national security over the last few days:

• Our beloved Attorney General, Singin’ John Ashcroft, shows some sense and recuses himself from the investigation of the Plame leak. As always, Joshua Marshall is all over the story. He suggests that this, combined with other announcements, suggests that this is a sign that there will be some serious fallout still to come.
• At the same time, the TSA continues to make life miserable for ordinary travelers, including this college student, who was ordered by a TSA agent at La Guardia to flush her Betta fish, although US Airways had assured her that she could fly with her aquatic pet.
• Completing the idiot Homeland Security trifecta for this week is the warning that people carrying almanacs are a threat to national security, while Republican Representative Christopher Shays sounds the Chicken Little note by warning people to stay out of Times Square. I think I preferred it back when we told people to keep doing their normal lives, “or else the terrorists have won.”

I have a new long piece about DAAA09-02-D-0007, the Halliburton logistics support contract, which uses published DD-350s (reports of contract actions to Congress) to track the exact spending to date against the contract. Bottom line: through the end of the government’s fiscal year 2003 (September 30, 2003), about $1.9 billion was obligated on the contract, almost half in the months of August and September. Or, to put it another way:

I finally picked up Merrill Peterson’s biography of Jefferson again after putting it aside for almost a year. I’m glad I waited to start reading it again. The words Peterson wrote about Jefferson and his colleagues in the revolution are even more relevant today:

Jefferson’s progress from Virginia burgess to American revolutionist in seven years followed the main road of the patriot cause, beginning with the protective defense of traditional rights and liberties and ending with the radical ideology that became the birth-right and creed of a new nation. … In the course of asserting their claims within the empire, the colonists became increasingly disenchanted with the home government, distrustful of its designs, and anxious for the security of their own polities. They began to think for themselves and to search out their own identity …

If there are better words out there to describe what is happening in the blogosphere today, I don’t know them.

Augusto Pinochet claimed on Tuesday, during an interview on the occasion of his 88th birthday, that he was a democratic leader, a “patriotic angel” with nothing to apologize for.

On Monday, new court testimonies were published giving details of how at least 400 of the thousands of Pinochet opponents who were “disappeared” during his regime (I believe Mr. Pinochet has the dubious distinction of verbing that particularly ominous adjective) were “dumped into the ocean strapped to pieces of railroad track to make them sink.”

Yes, of course, there is nothing to apologize for. In a world where the opposition does not exist and therefore has no rights.

In retrospect, Sting’s “Cueca Solo (They Dance Alone),” written in 1987, seems grossly inadequate in its description of the effects of the Pinochet regime’s atrocities. But it’s also the humane response to the horrors that the regime brokered:

They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone
They dance alone

The report that the FBI is keeping tabs on anti-war protesters casts a chilling shadow, even giving the damages already inflicted on freedom of association by the PATRIOT Act. The FBI says it’s only looking for “anarchists and ‘extremist elements’ plotting violence.”

But by Singin’ John Ashcroft’s actions last year, the agency is already using political and religious profiling to conduct surveillance without evidence of criminal activity.

Taken together, the measures suggest that anyone involved in protesting the war, “extremist” or not, could be subject to FBI surveillance as long as they meet the right political and religious profile.

I used to scoff at the tin hat brigades. Now I wonder. Maybe it’s time for that FOIA request.

I may not always agree with my country’s policies and actions abroad, but that doesn’t lessen the respect and gratitude I owe the men and women of our armed forces who gave the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their country. Also see Oliver Willis’s remembrance.

Joshua Marshall says that there have been reports of voter intimidation and harassment, including videotaping and entering the booth with the voter. Many of the reports were from predominantly minority districts. The reports were made by that irresponsible fearmonger…the Mississippi Secretary of State. Read the text of the reports here.

Interesting little story: In his press conference today ,President Bush now disclaimed responsibility for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that greeted him when he landed on the USS Lincoln. He says now that it was the sailors on the Lincoln who put out that banner. But the New York Times, following the landing in May, said that it was Bush’s media coordinator Scott Sforza (paid link; copy of the article for free here) who did the deed.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, according to Bush’s own staff after his press conference, it isn’t the Commander in Chief. According to the article, “Lincoln’s crew asked the White House to have the sign made. The White House asked a private vendor to produce the sign, and the crew put it up, said the spokeswoman. She said she did not know who paid for the sign.” As Kos points out, regardless of who paid for the sign, the White House thought it was a good enough idea to act as a middleman with the private vendor who produced it.

More thoughts at Oliver Willis, Andrew Bayer, and the Clark campaign.

The Olympian: Many soldiers, same letter: Newspapers around US get identical missives from Iraq. The letter apparently was handed out by the platoon leader, who asked soldiers to sign it; speculation is that someone is trying really hard to put a positive face on the war. Some of the soldiers were unhappy that their signatures appeared on papers that weren’t their own thoughts:

2nd Battalion soldier [Sgt. Shawn Grueser] said he did not sign any letter.

Although Grueser said he agrees with the letter’s sentiments, he was uncomfortable that a letter with his signature did not contain his own words or spell out his own accomplishments.

“It makes it look like you cheated on a test, and everybody got the same grade,” Grueser said by phone from a base in Italy where he had just arrived from Iraq.

Infothought has a follow-up that shows how to search for all the astroturfed letters on Google. About fourteen hits from different papers.

Here’s Instapundit on the astroturfs: most of the letters seem to be sent out voluntarily, even if they were all the same.

Compare this with the GOP astroturf campaign a few months back. I know it’s common practice, but you know, it still smells. A few of the papers did features on the letters from the front, as though the boys that signed them had actually written the letters.

An old Virginia Glee Club friend, Paul Stancil, emailed me to give some balance to my sour grapes about Schwarzenegger’s victory last night. Paul is hereby voted Hoo who most needs to get a blog. I’ll wait to post the 500-word letter until I get his permission to share it, but the gist is that there are bits of the Hitler story that don’t hang together, that the credibility of the rumors about Schwarzenegger and Enron bear investigating, and that Davis and Bustamente were attempting to make political hay from an economically bad situation with Enron. If anything, Paul reminds me of an assertion that I’ve often (though not nearly often enough) made about the blogosphere: It’s all too easy to find only opinions and commentary that confirm your own opinions and worst fears.

Joseph de Maistre once said “every people gets the government it deserves.” Not sure what that says about California, whose people just elected Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man with no previous political experience and no stated policies or philosophy of government, who expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and ran his only business venture into bankruptcy, as well as allegedly selling the state’s settlement with Enron down the river, Governor.

Just the guy to lead the nation’s largest state out of the nation’s second-largest deficit, right?

Well. If the most populous state in the nation has transformed the political process into a circus—complete with the Strongman—is it any wonder some of us look to the blogosphere, or anywhere else, for the salvation of the political process?

Some additional thoughts and links about the Diebold voting machine security issue: Greg was kind enough to point out to me over IM, rather than chiding me publicly for it on his blog, that it’s unlikely that Georgia’s Democrat Secretary of State, who has responsibility for running elections, would be unlikely to help rig an election via voting machines in favor of the Republicans. He also passed along a link or two, including one I should have caught in the MIT Technology Review, about security issues with the voting machines.

At bottom, the whole mess still feels to me like a problem of under-secured, under-audited, badly-managed software development.

I’ve been on the fence about this whole California recall thing. While California is clearly a state in the toilet right now, its voters re-elected Gray Davis fair and square even after he had screwed the state up. If someone wanted to prevent him from doing future harm, the best way would seem to be to invest in voter turnout programs.

Then I read today’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which quotes GOP congressman Darrell Issa, whose $1.6 million expenditure funded the effort to get signatures for the recall petition, as saying that voters should vote against the recall if the GOP ticket remains split. “”If two major Republicans remain on the ballot, I’d advise you to vote ‘no’ on the recall…It would absolutely guarantee that (Democratic Lt. Gov.) Cruz Bustamante will be the governor, even though a majority of voters are asking for a no-tax solution…”

Hmm. I thought the purpose of a recall was to state that the office holder was so awful that no matter who replaced him, the state would be better off. Did Issa really not think that the Democrats stood a chance of doing that? Issa’s statement totally recasts the recall for me. It’s all just another cynical attempt to rewrite the results of a fair and legitimate election in favor of the GOP.

A closer look at the smoking gun memos. I think that Bev Harris does a good job pointing out the issues from a business perspective—and Salon plays up the possibility of tampering probably more than is supported by the data, though it makes for a fun conspiracy theory.

But the real story is the state of the software development behind these more-than-mission-critical systems. No software testing policies, no release process, no documented support procedures… some really good firefighters fixing problems for clients on the ground… friction between the developer and the certification agency… trade-offs between design criteria and customer business process reality… major undocumented functional changes between minor point releases suggesting poor or nonexistent requirements management… bad architecture leaving gaping security holes…

Yeah. I’ve been there (present job excepted, of course). I think it’s safe to say that every software developer has been there. But it really points out how important process is.

Why would a manufacturer of voting machines claim that the ability to easily tamper with votes recorded in them is no big deal? Oh, there are reasons, according to this Salon article about flaws in Diebold’s system, not least of which is the stated commitment of the CEO to deliver his state up to Bush next year. The flaw: anyone who has Microsoft Access can get at the database that stores the results and do anything with the data that they want. Including the audit logs. And in many cases the computers are connected to the Internet.

And the Diebold memos suggest that these back doors are not only known, but have been exploited, in Gaston County, NC—and in King County, Washington. Of course, I should note I’ve never seen these touch-panel systems in Kirkland, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

Other places that have used Diebold machines? The state of Georgia, where Max Cleland suffered an overnight 11 point shift, and Sonny Perdue was elected—the first Republican to be elected Governor in 134 years. Coincidence?

Wonder what Greg thinks about all this?

(For those without Salon day passes: The initial investigation by Bev Harris; the first Salon story from earlier this year; the smoking gun memos.)