Blogger, veteran, and author Colby Buzzell writes the following:
Since the Army was kind enough to send me an invitation to go back to Operation Iraqi Freedom, I decided to R.S.V.P. to it by writing a little Op-Ed piece about it for the San Francisco Chronicle.
On way out of my building two weeks ago, I checked my mailbox and found a letter from the Department of the Army with “Important Document” printed in all caps on the middle. I immediately felt sick, so I went back to my room, locked the door, grabbed a beer from the fridge and stared out my window for a while. People outside were all wearing sunglasses and walking about enjoying the sun. I took a picture.
WASHINGTON - A cargo ship contracted by the U.S Military Sealift Command has fired at least one shot toward an Iranian boat, a U.S. defense official said on Friday.
“It was an MSC vessel,” the official said, confirming the ship fired on an Iranian boat.
Other details were not immediately available. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain did not have any immediate comment.
First, to get this out of the way, Hillary clearly ‘won’ (please note that I am an Obama supporter) the Philadelphia Democratic debate which took place at the National Constitution Center last night (Wednesday, 4/17/2008) .
You may recall my prior post about John Yoo and the politicization of the Justice Department. One of the things several bloggers have mentioned, after reading through the content and footnotes of Yoo’s 81-page torture memo (drafted when he was a rising star in the Office of Legal Counsel) was the notable absence of a particular hallmark case…
Mukasey blubbers about how a missed phone call from a 9/11 Hijacker, if intercepted, could have stopped 9/11. Hamilton refutes this by essentially saying this is important, yet was not shared with the 9/11 Commission, implying one of three things:
Mukasey was making it up for dramatic appeal.
He was repeating something heard elsewhere, believing it to be true.
Somehow, something quite important was suppressed from the 9/11 Commision.
I’ve wanted to write something about John Yoo and the torture memos, but it’s depressing and secondly I don’t like to write things that the more well-read political junkies already know, and I’m not sure how to sum up the intricacies of the entirety of Yoo, Bush, and the law in a way that will challenge any of the uninformed, misinformed, or Bush cheerleaders.Regardless, I’m tackling it anyway.
Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
QLite for structured data storage
Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
When you look at the hardware on a fully-optioned phone, you get an opportunity to rival the iPhone interface (let’s be honest, that’s what’s sexy). I’m particularly thinking of the ability to run a server on the device, and the possibilities to tie in location, hand-movements, speed, time, directionality, and context (based on previous use) into the interface.
Foreign Policy has a nice chart, breaking down the war, by the numbers. Remember, ‘we’ll be greeted as liberators’, the ‘war will pay for itself with Iraqi Oil’, and no matter what any pesky Pentagon reports say, Saddam and Al Qaeda were THIS close.
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … Itis a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.
– T.E. Lawrence, Report to the Sunday Times (London), Aug. 2, 1920.
As soon as I had heard that a second fiber-optic undersea internet cable (map and story here and here - the number of broken cables now stands at four) had been broken in the Middle East, I automatically thought of the United States, the Bush Administrations desire to hit Iran, and the USS Jimmy Carter.
In the US Navy, tradition is that Presidents names are placed on aircraft carriers. But things would be different for Jimmy Carter, a former Nuclear Submariner. The Seawolf class submarine that would eventually bare his name would also be different than her class-mates.
Presidents are incredibly tight-lipped about the contents of their PDBs, or Presidential Daily Briefings. Very few of them have ever seen the light of day via FOIA request and subsequent declassification, with very few exceptions. The most recent and notorious example was that of President Bush's August 6, 2001 PDB, pre-9/11, which was titled "Bin Laden determined to strike US", detailing various avenues and methods of attack. In Scooter Libby's obstruction case, the defense attempted to gain access to PDB-related documents, hoping to use a greymail defense - one that was only partially effective .
The Nixon library just released a bundle of documents, as reported by the Federation of American Scientists at the Secrecy News blog , including some that shed insight on the PDB process, specifically indicating that PDB's are often contain 'intelligence' from newspapers and other journalistic resources.
As for the selection process that determines what to include in the PDB, Mr. Marshall wrote in his Top Secret Codeword report, "It is derived… to a large extent, I believe, from a sense of what's timely as judged from the New York Times, press, and wire service coverage."
This is particularly troubling, given allegations of partisanship and declining journalistic standards, and especially as there are no safeguards in place to prevent a bad-actor from planting a story to advance the agenda of a group, nation, corporation, or individual. Who can tell if the same processes are in place today? We've heard that 'chatter' from blogs has even made it to the PDBs. And it's not as though this administration has ever indicated that they wouldn't just pay for the news they want.
As a hypothetical, Dick Cheney was the firewall to George W. Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq war. The neocons are well connected through the press and various think tanks - for example, Judith Miller stenography towards advancing their goals. When biased reporting, originating from neocon corners and con-men, get laundered in the newspapers, and then get legitimized as actionable intelligence by our government, the consequences are much more dear than journalistic integrity.
