Iraq'd all up

It sounds like Allawi knows how to cap some insurgent ass, for better or worse. They say he shot six captured rebels, but that's the way it goes these days...

Spencer Ackerman's blog Iraq'd is back up and he has no idea if the man is a "cold-blooded murderer." eh....

Good piece from Hoaglund on the 'perception gap' on Iraq, pointing out that Allawi has a tendency to make pronouncements aimed at the beltway, and that whole attitude could cause even more divergent pointless thinking about Iraq:

Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.

Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.

The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.

There is some new stuff in the Valerie Plame case. So Wilson didn't actually debunk the Iran-Niger story? And wives pull all the strings, rendering a man worthless, or so they say in the WaPo.

Josh Marshall is hacking through the details as usual but I found the following via Raimondo:

Fafnir is a broken-hearted Fafnir. For I was deceived. Deceived by the story of Joe Wilson who as it turns out lied about absolutely everything he said to anyone ever because there in the Washington Post last Saturday exists definitive proof that somebody somewhere has said that his wife, exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, got him his job checking out if Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Poor foolish Fafnir! I had thought somehow this was all about how exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a federal crime but apparently it is really about how her husband is a big fat jerk who got a job by ridin his wife's coattails. I don't quite understand what that has to do with a criminal investigation but hipublican intellectual Jonah Goldberg does so that's OK.*

Washington journalist Laura Rozen is exploring the echo theory on intel distortions, that is, the same spoofers spoofed many different agencies, creating the appearance of truth such as WMDs all over the place.

Found a nifty Mesopotamian blog Iraq the Model, that I don't think I'd seen before.

Older news that polygraph tests have been done in the Chalabi-Iran leak investigation.

Look out, the NAACP says that Bush treats black people like prostitutes. What more can I say? A man with 8% of the black vote can't be wrong, can he?

The Persian crunch

A pretty dramatic development at hand as the 9/11 commission pins a great deal of Al Qaeda activity on Iran's government. It is not too hard to believe, surely, that Iran's intelligence services might have helped some dudes get around between the Afghan frontier, Pakistan and so forth. It's a rather more plausible casus belli than we stomped into Iraq with, which is a great part of why the war was so perplexing. Via a DKos thread here are some news links about the Iran strategic situation:

Starting at the top, a delightful headline: "Report: Israel's 'first strike' plan against Iran ready" from the JPost. Ex-neoconservative William Lind heard the hit might come this year. Tehran here we come... America or the Israelis. A mysterious report from July 1 about "Iran Reacts to U.S. Power Loss." Last December, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski opined about the pipeline politics in Central Asia.

The almighty neocon mastermind Michael Ledeen wrote about Iran for the millionth time. It's kind of funny ("Are you sitting down? Iran is a terrorist state.") but obviously this man should be regarded with as much suspicion as any mullah you might find.

Back in 2001, Asia Times reported that Bin Laden had been traced to Iran. In 1999, Shell oil put together an oil deal with Iran and some companies defied U.S. sanctions.

There's some complex demand problems among growing Asian nations, who are looking to Iran to fill energy needs. A Pakistani paper said that "Japan must ensure its Iranian oil supply" today.

For rather ugly leftie resource sites, look no further than oilempire.us.

In other misc mideast news, apparently Egypt's cabinet resigned on July 9th and no one noticed. Does this have anything to do with the flare-up in Gaza??

I enjoyed this feature, "Sightseeing in Oman? You Mustn't Miss the Smugglers" in the Times but sadly, its disappeared into the pay archives.

British government stings Fox News for false statements

The classic movie Network, which I inexcusably haven't seen yet, was on Bravo today, full of bleeped words. Yet the scene where the anchor says that we are the illusion rings more true today than ever.

The Britons are flustered over complaints from viewers that Fox News' horrible John Gibson made a bunch of rash statements about the BBC hating America back in January, etc. etc. The government found against Fox, ruling that

We recognise how important freedom of expression is within the media. This item was part of a well-established spot, in which the presenter put forwards his own opinion in an uncompromising manner. However, such items should not make false statements by undermining facts. Fox News was unable to provide any substantial evidence to support the overall allegation that the BBC management had lied and the BBC had an anti-American obsession. It had also incorrectly attributed quotes to the reporter Andrew Gilligan.

Even taking into account that this was a ‘personal view’ item, the strength and number of allegations that John Gibson made against the BBC meant that Fox News should have offered the BBC an opportunity to respond.

Fox News was therefore in breach of Sections 2.1 (respect for truth), 2.7 (opportunity to take part), and 3.5(b) (personal view programmes - opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence) of the Programme Code.

Nice. I just wish some section of the American government might at least comment on the regular stream of misrepresentations issuing from the idiot box. (news bit via the DKos)

CENTCOM meets HongPong.com, rabbit blogs

Heh, I just ran my server logs for the first time in ages. Seems that my May-June logs went down the memory hole somewhere, which is too bad... The results for the past few weeks have been spectacular, despite my incredible laziness in keeping the site up.

Military surfers took their fiercest interest yet, as I got hits from korea.army.mil, as well as nipr.mil, a mysterious firewall developed by the DoD, as detailed in this blog. andrews.af.mil and eglin.af.mil, maxwell.af.mil, Andrews, Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases I would presume, also stopped by. gate5-sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, also came thru to the site. blackhawk.goodfellow.af.mil is the most badass sounding. Multiple mach blog surfing??

It looks like all three branches of the federal government, the Australian defense department and several bits of the military think that HongPong.com is just fantastic!! Considering I'm so lazy, that's one hell of an impact.

From further afield in the .mil we get even more interesting entries:

walker-cache.korea.army.mil

gateway5.osd.mil - Office of Secretary of Defense??!?!?

iern.disa.mil Defense Intelligence Services Agency

And the granddaddy hit of hits:

cache1.iraq.centcom.mil

Ladies and gentlemen, CENTCOM was here. Thank you.

denver-254.blm.gov - Bureau of Land Management?!
gov.calgary.ab.ca - Government of Calgary

housegate4.house.gov - The House is in the house.

gk-central-100.usps.gov - Post Office too. What agency isn't hanging out here?!?
gtwy.uscourts.gov - Ahh, the federal courts.
defence.gov.au - And the fine Australian defense department.
nhtsa.dot.gov - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (they are watching my driving!)
ssa.gov - Social Security Administration
sherman.state.gov - State Department!!

I would like to pull a couple lines from my server logs.... evidence of a technological victory, if not a moral one. The entire contents of my Iraq page was downloaded by the CENTCOM Iraq computer...

[IP deleted] - - [15/Jul/2004:18:16:34 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/topics/iraq/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 688128 "http://www.hongpong.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

Meanwhile, we determine that the person at the State Department ran a search for "Chalabi" and "Zell" back in April!

[IP deleted] - - [23/Apr/2004:14:25:19 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/000104.html HTTP/1.0" 200 11699 "http://www.google.com/search?q=chalabi+zell&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

This is quite surprising, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the whole, I feel I've been brutally as honest as I could have been. I am glad that they got the page and looked at it... or didn't. Who knows? I have removed the IP numbers, despite their public nature, as I wouldn't want to anger the ECHELON system too much today.

As long as everyone is paying attention, I should quickly point out that Kat has an ethereal nightvision picture on the apparently rabbit-run blog fury & frost, itself a side project of Kat's sister at Glucose who helped develop the weather popup menu WeatherPop.

Here's to my growing community of national security readers!! Huzzah! If I'm not a particle in the grand conspiracy yet, at least I may influence some other particles...

Third party time!

In front of the theater on Friday there was a guy with a table set up handing out flyers and talking to people. He turned out to be one Thomas Harens, new pre-candidate for President here in Minnesota. He's started the Christian Freedom Party, a group opposed to the Christian right that would supposedly strip votes from Bush's right in Minnesota, perhaps a reverse Ralph Nader. Gotta love the beret on his campaign site.

There's something uniquely American about such a scene, that our system permits a guy from St. Paul to form a party, collect some signatures and get on the ballot. In Minnesota, the threshold is only 2,000 signatures, lower than most. Along with Alex Legge, we signed his petition to the Secretary of State. It's quite improbable to find a third-party presidential candidate getting started virtually on my doorstep. I talked with the guy, and I hope to get some interesting news out of this one...