Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Let's do the link dump again!
Agonist reported twice that the DC-based Nelson Report discussed how the Downing Street Memo is causing people to begin making historical comparisons to impeachments and other scandals. "British bombing raids were illegal, says Foreign Office", referring to the Iraq bombing that escalated before the "real" war started. Getting to be big news on the AP finally... Produced a faboulous Poll on MSNBC... anyway, the goods::
A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.
The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.
The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.
The decision to provoke the Iraqis emerged in leaked minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and his most senior advisers — the so-called Downing Street memo published by The Sunday Times shortly before the general election.
Democratic congressmen claimed last week the evidence it contains is grounds for impeaching President George Bush.
Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.
Ministry of Defence figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the “spikes” began in May 2002.
However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.
The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action. The war finally started in March 2003.
[.....]
Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.
The air war had already begun six weeks earlier and the spikes of activity had been underway for five months.
it is fun to follow gov't proceedings on CSPAN via threads on DailyKos. In this case, yet another blocking of Mr Bolton in the Senate. Gotta love this Bolton cartoon. Sounds like things are already working better at the State Department now that he's gone.
Also via the Kos, Scott Ritter is saying the war on Iran has already begun. Well, that's true, as far as we let the dogs of war at the MEK go attack Iran... And of course the new Republican effort to shut down the independence of reporting at PBS. A consultant termed pieces on the show Now with Bill Moyers. Various new tags included "anti-corporation," "anti-DeLay" and "anti-Bush." Orwell is so helpful.
Old transcript from MSNBC Hardball featuring Pawlenty and James Bamford, author of "A Pretext for War." Not relevant to everyone else, I just needed the link.
There is news that the United States is pissed off that Israel is selling sweet tech to China, in particular Harpy Killer unmanned attack drones designed to target radar systems. The U.S. apparently developed these drones and now fears they could be used to attack Taiwan. Nice.
Kinda liked this Friedman article because it suggests that without an heir apparent, Bush's agenda is drifting towards chaos and pandering instead of actually useful policy.
Richard Clarke about the quiet squawking coming from military people in Washington who are-gasp-willing to depart fluffy cloud country and say something negative about Freedom Quest:Mesopotamia.
The "gay vague" style. WTF, this is another reason why popular culture is ridiculous to me.
Political orientation may have genetic markers. Oh shit, here comes the mental genetic engineering.
Older stories about Syria's state-sponsored clergy and it's voices for change.
i gotta go. Arthur Cheng's here, and we're going to a Twins game tonight. Hell yeah!
It seems that there are a lot of sources now leaking memos out of the British government, which help reveal a more complete picture of the mentality of the hawks early on... ThinkProgress.org has the full text of five different British government papers. Of course, on June 12, the Times of London released another Cabinet Office paper, "Conditions for Military Action," which talked about the need to fabricate a legal pretext to invade the country.
So here are your new and tasty leaked docs: The British Iraq Options Paper, the Manning Paper, the Meyer Paper, the Ricketts Paper, the Straw Paper and the British Legal Background Paper.
I haven't dug around to determine the veracity of these memos... However they all contain information that discredits the Bush administration's drive for war. As thinkprogress cites:
British Knew Iraqi WMD Were Not a Threat: “There is no greater threat now that [Saddam] will use WMD than there has been in recent years, so continuing containment is an option.” [Iraq: Options Paper]
Evidence Did Not Show Much Advance In Iraq’s Weapons Programs: “Even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on [the] nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.” [Ricketts Paper, 3/22/02]
Evidence Was Thin on Iraq/Al Qaeda Ties: “US is scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al [Qaida] is so far frankly unconvincing.” [Ricketts Paper, 3/22/02]
“No Credible Evidence” On Iraq/Al Qaeda Link: “There has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL and Al Qaida.” [Straw Paper, 3/25/02]
Wolfowitz Knew Supposed Iraq/Al Qaeda Link Was Weak: Wolfowitz said that “there might be doubt about the alleged meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi intelligence (did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting?).” [Meyer Paper, 3/18/02]
As Justin Raimondo bitterly noted, the Meyer paper says that Wolfowitz wanted to dwell on Saddam's atrocities. As Meyer put it, "Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel." This struck me as an interesting element of the structure of the American-Israeli moral hegemony complex. It sort of suggests that the war itself was designed to alter the moral geography between Israel and Iraq, to prove that Israel is on some sort of higher plane of geopolitics, and in turn, is more morally suited to dominate the region. Of course, this tracks with the worldview seen in such classic hits as the Clean Break document.
In the WaPo, EJ Dionne offered:
"The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda."
In another column Raimondo cites the unexpected antiwar swing of a "Freedom Fries" Republican Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina. He has no love for the neo-cons these days:
"'When I look at the number of men and women who have been killed – it's almost 1,700 now, in addition to close to 12,000 have been severely wounded – and I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there"
Interviewer George Stephanopoulos asked him who is to blame: Rumsfeld? The president? Jones answered:
"I think it's primarily the neoconservatives who were advisers in key positions in both the Department of Defense and I think that they gave bad advice."
He "felt deceived when he was told that so-called 'neoconservatives' in the Pentagon had wanted to invade Iraq long before Sept. 11," and he recalls how he got "'very, very upset' when he learned there were no weapons of mass destruction 'and that information was manipulated to justify the invasion.'"
Sweet. So someone Red Gets it. How many more on the way?
Dude from the London Times offers a basic explanation of the Syrian-foreign fighter route into Iraq. There is staggering corruption. Porter Goss' recent comment about knowing where Bin Laden is provoked some waves in Pakistan and Afganistan. So maybe Goss doesn't want to go in and get OBL in Pakistan because it might cause an Islamist coup. Juan Cole has some interesting thoughts about what they feel in Pakistan now.
WEll well well... the Kurds are rumored to be up to no good. After all, they just want to live in peace, once they have gained control of Kirkuk and Mosul, after chipping off some nice swaths of Turkey, Iran and Syria. WaPo reported June 15 that "Kurdish officials Sanction Abductions from Kirkuk," apparently a direct effort to intimidate Sunni Arabs into leaving. There is a great deal of violence, including suicide bombings, now happening in the area. Under the cloak of the war on Terror, population re-engineering is going down, and who knows what the results shall be?
KIRKUK, Iraq -- Police and security units, forces led by Kurdish political parties and backed by the U.S. military, have abducted hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmens in this intensely volatile city and spirited them to prisons in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, government documents and families of the victims.
Seized off the streets of Kirkuk or in joint U.S.-Iraqi raids, the men have been transferred secretly and in violation of Iraqi law to prisons in the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Sulaymaniyah, sometimes with the knowledge of U.S. forces. The detainees, including merchants, members of tribal families and soldiers, have often remained missing for months; some have been tortured, according to released prisoners and the Kirkuk police chief.
A confidential State Department cable, obtained by The Washington Post and addressed to the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the "extra-judicial detentions" were part of a "concerted and widespread initiative" by Kurdish political parties "to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner."
The abductions have "greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines" and endangered U.S. credibility, the nine-page cable, dated June 5, stated. "Turkmen in Kirkuk tell us they perceive a U.S. tolerance for the practice while Arabs in Kirkuk believe Coalition Forces are directly responsible."
[....]
Kirkuk, a city of almost 1 million, is home to Iraq's most combustible mix of politics and economic power. Kurds, who are just shy of a majority in the city and are growing in number, hope to make Kirkuk and the vast oil reserves beneath it part of an autonomous Kurdistan. Arabs and Turkmens compose most of the rest of the population. They have struck an alliance to curb the ambitions of the Kurds, who have wielded increasing authority in a long-standing collaboration with their U.S. allies.
Some abductions occurred more than a year ago. But according to U.S. officials, Kirkuk police and Arab leaders, the campaign surged after the Jan. 30 elections consolidated the two main Kurdish parties' control over the Kirkuk provincial government. The two parties are the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases; Arab and Turkmen politicians put the number at more than 600 and said many families feared retribution for coming forward.
U.S. and Iraqi officials, along with the State Department cable, said the campaign was being orchestrated and carried out by the Kurdish intelligence agency, known as Asayesh, and the Kurdish-led Emergency Services Unit, a 500-member anti-terrorism squad within the Kirkuk police force. Both are closely allied with the U.S. military. The intelligence agency is made up of Kurds, and the emergency unit is composed of a mixture of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens.
The cable indicated that the problem extended to Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city and the main city in the north, and regions near the Kurdish-controlled border with Turkey.
The transfers occurred "without authority of local courts or the knowledge of Ministries of Interior or Defense in Baghdad," the State Department cable stated. U.S. military officials said judges they consulted in Kirkuk declared the practice illegal under Iraqi law.
Early on, the campaign targeted former Baath Party officials and suspected insurgents, but it has since broadened. Among those seized and secretly transferred north were car merchants, businessmen, members of tribal families, Arab soldiers and, in one case, an 87-year-old farmer with diabetes.
[....]
[Kirkuk police chief] Abdel-Rahman said he was concerned that the Americans were being duped by the Kurds, who he said have cloaked what is effectively a power grab as a crackdown on the insurgents. Their strategy, he said, is to bolster their alliance with the Americans.
"Unfortunately, they have succeeded," he said.
Blagburn, the intelligence officer, said that even though the Emergency Services Unit is largely responsible for the secret transfers, it continues to provide valuable assistance in the counterinsurgency. Blagburn termed the unit "a very cooperative, coalition-friendly system."
"We know we can drop a guy in there and he'd be taken care of and he's safe," Blagburn said. "That's the reason why the ESU is used most of the time. That's basically the unit we can trust the most."
Naturally, the talk about Apple putting Intel chips into Macs has the open source community chattering, and a massive thread on Slashdot revealed a few interesting things about the current possibilities for using open-source tools to run OS X on generic PC hardware, using tools such as Linux as a layer to simulate the proper hardware environment.
The great thing is that there is already software, PearPC, the PowerPC Architecture Emulator, which can simulate Macs on PCs running Linux. Right now, PearPC is relatively slow in convert PPC instructions to x86, but with future Mac software recompiled for x86, an entire technical hurdle will disappear. Speculations on running OS X on Beige box PCs also at PearPC community site.
It will not be hard to get current Mac software to run on Intel chips. The Unreal Tournament developer reports that it is not at all hard to get his games switched over.
I thought this concept was interesting...
The future of Linux in the server market is secure simply because IBM has invested in Linux on the server. IBM never abandons rich customers who have purchased legacy (which, in this case, is Linux servers) from IBM.
However, the desktop is where Linux will die before it is even established. Apple will not drive a stake into the heart of Linux, but rather, the hordes of hackers and Taiwanese-run peripheral factories in China will kill Linux on the desktop. There are 3 scenarios. First, the hackers write a patch that will enable Mac OS X to run on conventional x86-based IBM PC clones. Second, the Taiwanese engineers will violate scores of American patents and build a cheap (possibly, $10.00) hardware plug-in card that will enable OS X to run on conventional IBM PC clones. The 3rd possibility is a combination of the first two.
An interesting side effect of these efforts will be taking marketshare from Windows XP and successors. In the server market, Linux has taken market share from UNIX instead of Windows. However, on the x86 desktop market, there is no 3rd OS to compete against MAC OS X. There are only 2 OSes: Windows and OS X on x86. They will compete head-on, against each other.
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM), I would be pleased to see Apple crush Windows on x86. Apple has a good chance of winning this matchup since the goodwill of open-source developers is on the side of Apple.
Apple's team: million-person army of open-source developers + freeBSD + most-consumer-friendly (i.e. idiot proof) OS called OS X Microsoft's team: couple thousand paid but possibly disgruntled slaves (including) H-1Bs + consumer-unfriendly OS. "It" is no contest. Apple wins by 70% marketshare.
This is nothing but good news for Apple. Microsoft should be paranoid as hell...