The Strident Centrist Blog

Last summer’s collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis focused Minnesotans’ attention on the states’ decaying transportation infrastructure, and that led to the overwhelming support for the Democrat-sponsored bill to fund maintenance and improvements with an increase of the fuel tax at the pump. Governor Pawlenty’s alternative was a less aggressive spending increase, funded by the preferred GOP practice of palming most of the costs off onto future generations with borrowed money. Six state House Republicans voted with the Democrats to successfully override the governor’s veto.

Now those six have been summarily stripped of their positions as the ranking minority members of various committees, and replaced by radical authoritarians. (The right wing elements of the Republican Party are no longer “conservatives” in any meaningful sense of the word, and thus I don’t use the term in reference to them.) (more…)

For those of us who remember November 22, 1963, this headline in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram about Wednesday’s rally is just plain scary!

The New York Times this morning has a story about a newly discovered way in which encrypted data on can be compromised when you have physical access to the computer. The discovery was made by a group at Princeton University, and it is described in chilling detail. All you need to do is turn off the computer, quickly remove the DRAM memory modules, throughly cool them down, reinsert them into a computer with equipped with a utility that will enable you to locate and read out the keys used to decode the encrypted data, then use the keys to access that data on the hard disk. The colder you chill the DRAM module the longer it will retain its memory contents. Several minutes can be achieved with an ordinary “Canned Air” duster, whereas hours of retention are possible with liquid nitrogen. Here’s the page at the university’s website where you can find more details.

The best source by far that I’m aware of regarding the ins and outs and pros and cons of the outsourcing of intelligence and defense work is R. J. Hillhouse’s blog The Spy Who Billed Me. Hillhouse, who is also a published novelist, is cagey about the specifics of her background but she definitely knows firsthand whereof she speaks. Today she put up a post that is bound to create a shit storm, albeit one that may very well remain largely out of public view. Certainly those involved will try to keep the lid on it.

Her blog has an avid readership among the intelligence and defense commuinities, as might be expected. Today she grabs onto a piece of string left by a surfer from one of the most secretive contracting companies, whom she identifies by the pseudonym “Heckle and Jeckle”, and pulls on it to unravel a deluge of information about what that company does, who they do it for, how, and the types of people they hire to do it. It’s a long post but utterly compelling reading. Here’s how she closes it out: (more…)

At his blog The Reality-based Community, Mark Kleiman asserts that David Herszenhorn’s writing in the New York Times bears similarities to ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek (of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian scriptures, respectively). That is, like both of those languages, Herszenhorn’s piece in yesterday’s Times on John McCain and torture leaves implicit a lot of “connecting tissue”l, so to speak. So Kleiman helps us along by inserting the missing pieces in italics, as was the custom for the translators of the King James version. To wit, the opening paragraph as so elaborated:

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Wednesday to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods [called “torture” under domestic and international law] that have been used by the Central Intelligence Agency [and an unknown number of other agencies and contractors] against [an unknown number of people described by the government as] high-level terrorism suspects [at least scores of whom have died as a result]. The vote, following House passage of the measure in December, set up a confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto it.

Darius Rejali is an Iran-born professor at Reed College who wrote Torture and Democracy, which was published last fall. Horton of Harpers interviews him following his customary Six Questions format.

Torture casts a very long shadow. When a state tortures, many decent professionals retire, leaving the police forces, the military and the intelligence services in disgust. So those who stayed behind create a culture of impunity. Torture also has a powerful deprofessionalizing ethic, damaging other intelligence efforts. Why do the hard work of using proper police and interrogation techniques when you’ve got a bat?. Considering that most recent whistleblowers have had to hide in fear, including the man who revealed the Abu Ghraib tortures, it will be difficult to recruit good people to do this work. How can you prevent waste or fraud, much less torture, if you are not going to protect whistleblowers? You can’t.

According to the National Post, a hot story in Great Britain is the art forging business of the Family Greenhalgh. The art talent was son Shuan, now 46 and still living at home with Mom and Pop, now in their 80s, who did the marketing.

After many successful years, and scores of sales, the Greenhalghs were caught out by that old devil hubris. Shaun, deeply impressed by his own talent, forgot that serious chicanery requires careful attention to detail. He sent the British Museum what was apparently an ancient Assyrian stone relief showing a soldier and horses with cuneiform writing. It looked great until someone noticed a minor spelling mistake in the writing and someone else said that the harness on the horses was from the wrong period.

The Air Force announces that the F-22 has now reached its “full operational capability.” So we should breath a sigh of relief. Or perhaps one of apprehension. An Op Ed piece in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram co-authored by Pierre Sprey, one of the late John Boyd’s proteges in his Fighter Mafia, lays out the gory details.

The F-22 was first conceived in the early 1980s as the next generation fighter for the mission of establishing air superiority over the Warsaw Pact forces as they tried to roar west through Germany’s Fulda Gap. Late in that decade two contractor teams developed prototypes and the Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics consortium was declared the winner of the fly-off in August, 1991. That, the reader may recall, was the same month that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics began its final slide into oblivion. It was also seven months after the First Gulf War in which the Coalitiion’s air arm, equipped with the aging hardware that the F-22 was intended to replace, demonstrated its overwhelming dominance over an Iraqi Air Force that had been supplied and trained by the USSR.

You’d have thought that such momentous events might cause a reconsideration of the need for such an expensive weapon system but instead the conductors hurried to roll the train out of the station, so to speak. Someone (it might have been B. H. Liddell Hart, but don’t make me swear to it) once wrote something to the effect that only the losers learn something from a war. That was true of the Germans after World War I, and similarly the case with Saddam following the war of 1991. Instead of trying to meet head-on the US blitzkrieg coming up the Tigris and Euphrates valleys from Kuwait, he dispersed massive amounts of arms and ammunition throughout the country in preparation for a post-invasion insurrection. The quagmire of 4th generation war is the result.

As Sprey and company point out, the good news is that there is no thought of deploying and using the F-22 in Iraq, or in Afghanistan for that matter. The bad news is that we’ll have spent a total of $65.3 billion for a total of 184 planes when the current contract is completed. That figure, which includes the development cost, works out to just shy of $355 million each! The USAF suggests that a fairer per copy number that strips out the R & D. That makes it at bargain of $159.9M. The question is how many lives would have been saved if just one or two of those had been canceled and the funds used for more effective body and Humvee armor?

Reference is frequently made to President Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech, in which he famously warned against the rising “Military-Industrial complex.” I recently saw somewhere that the first draft of the speech read ‘Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex,” but that the last word was struck from the final version at the behest of his political advisers. In retrospect that was unfortunate because they truly are as much a part of the problem as the other two. Furthermore, it’s not a partisan issue, but an institutional one.

“Emptywheel” has been live-blogging the Senate debate on the renewal of the FISA law. Hopefully this episode will one day be a minor footnote in our history, but if worst comes to worst it could come to be seen as a major turning point in the demise of the American democracy. This post includes a brief YouTube segment of Senator Feingold calling BS on the mendacity with which the administrations lackeys are trying to denigrate the amendments that Feingold and a few other Senators have proposed to preserve some shreds of the Bill of Rights. If you’re connected to the Internet toobz with what passes for a fat pipe in this country, don’t miss it. For those who don’t, the quote gives some flavor of his argument.

As EW points out along the way in her live-blogging threads of the hearings, the Democratic Senators who are leading this fight, especially Feingold (WI), and Whitehouse (RI), are peeling away the camouflage with which the Republicans are trying to hide their true intentions, namely a law that will enable them to eavesdrop on American citizens in America unhindered by any restraint. If you have the time and the interest scan through her posts on these debates.

William Lind, letting his inner monarchist run free, invokes the shade of Kaiser Wilhelm II:

“I trust that Your Majesty’s preferred alternative to democracy in monarchy, as is mine,” I said.

“Yours, mine and Heaven’s,” the Kaiser replied. “As I have said before, Heaven is not a republic. Though there are, I think, two countries God intends should be republics.”

“And those are?”, I asked.

“Switzerland, to show that it can be made to work, and America, to serve as a warning to everyone else.”

“Were America to wake up to the virtues of monarchy - and God knows our current election campaign should wake us up - who would you recommend for the American throne?”, I inquired.

“An Austrian Hapsburg, I should think,” said the Kaiser. “They are accustomed to ruling over ramshackle, polygot, decaying empires. My old friend Emperor Franz Josef did so remarkably well.”