Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: The Secret Sharer, at the New Yorker.  The article describes the case brought under the Espionage Act of 1917 against Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who became a whistleblower against the agency's surveillance of U.S. citizens:

Few people have a precise knowledge of the size or scope of the N.S.A.’s domestic-surveillance powers. An agency spokesman declined to comment on how the agency “performs its mission,” but said that its activities are constitutional and subject to “comprehensive and rigorous” oversight. But Susan Landau, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, and the author of a new book, “Surveillance or Security?,” notes that, in 2003, the government placed equipment capable of copying electronic communications at locations across America. These installations were made, she says, at “switching offices” that not only connect foreign and domestic communications but also handle purely domestic traffic. As a result, she surmises, the U.S. now has the capability to monitor domestic traffic on a huge scale. “Why was it done this way?” she asks. “One can come up with all sorts of nefarious reasons, but one doesn’t want to think that way about our government.”

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney considers himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”
On October 31, 2001, soon after Binney concluded that the N.S.A. was headed in an unethical direction, he retired. He had served for thirty-six years. His wife worked there, too. Wiebe, the analyst, and Ed Loomis, a computer scientist at SARC, also left. Binney said of his decision, “I couldn’t be an accessory to subverting the Constitution.”

The article stresses how badly the Bush administration violated the Constitution, then desperately tried to track down the whistleblowers who leaked their criminal activity.  It further indemnifies Obama for hypocritically prosecuting Drake, after claiming to oppose the NSA eavesdropping and claiming to support the rights of whistleblowers.  The executive branch has claimed way too much authority, and abuses of that power comes from whoever is in the White House.  The whole article is well worth reading, it is absolutely chilling.  Michael Hayden comes off especially poorly, as a corrupt hack who was too busy trying to get private contractors rich to figure out how to do things lawfully, or well.

A Season Before War

From the SI archive, Steve Rushin remembers baseball in 1941, the season before major league ballplayers joined the war effort:

In 1941, Joe DiMaggio traveled across the country by coal-fired locomotives and signed autographs with a fountain pen and stuck his arm out the window of his automobile (even in the dead of winter) before hanging a left, because his was an age before turbojet engines and ballpoints and turn signals. He played baseball in flannel pajamas, in stifling heat, and was cooled in clubhouses by an oscillating fan or a bottle of Ballantine's, kept cold in an icebox that was literally that—a block of ice in a wooden box. Co-incidentally, on the night 60 years ago that DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak ended in Cleveland, fans presented Indians manager Roger Peckinpaugh with a marvelous modern convenience: It was described, in the next day's New York Times, as an "electric refrigerator."
Ted Williams hit .406 in '41 without benefit of Palm Pilot, PlayStation or Nokia 8260. Nor did he enjoy homogenized milk, fluoridated water, central air, credit cards, fast food, TV or peace of mind. Consider: On May 15 of that year, when DiMaggio's streak began, Vichy France announced its collaboration with Nazi Germany. On July 17, the day the streak ended, the Nazis' second assault on Russia climaxed with nine million men engaged in fighting on that front. ARMY SELECTEE STARTS DRAFT OF 21-YEAR-OLDS, announced Page One of that day's edition of the Times. The Streak, meanwhile, was eulogized in Sports with but a single story.
All of which is to say—without going too Tom Brokaw on you—that '41 witnessed our greatest generation of ballplayers. True, baseball was not yet integrated, but DiMaggio and Williams alone engineered twin towers of achievement that no player has since scaled. They did so before expansion, chartered flights or steroids, when neither the ball nor the batters were juiced. In essence, these men were slapping matzoh balls off the centerfield wall with arms they developed the old-fashioned way: by signaling turns, in the dead of winter, out the window of a '39 Packard.

In this age of the all-volunteer army, it is hard for me to imagine a time when major league athletes, let alone everyday middle-class citizens, were drafted into the armed forces.  I carry around a 1943 steel penny to remind myself of a time when fighting a war meant that the general public made sacrifices.  I guess that is a time long-gone.

Bush-era War Criminals Continue Claiming Torture Located Bin Laden

Barry Ritholtz takes the offensive against the torture works meme.  He highlights Dan Froomkin making the case that torture slowed down the investigation:

Indeed, as Dan Froomkin notes in a little-noticed essay, torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.
But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.
“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.
It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.
“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.
In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

I would think that an examination of human nature would tell you that would be the case.  When your enemies resort to torture, they are proving your belief in their inherent evil.  It becomes heroic in your mind to resist them as much as possible.  Because you are suffering physical pain, you have to tell them things, so you make stuff up.  They can't know what is true and what isn't, so they have to try to confirm these stories, leaving you with time to embellish more, and come up with reasons for why they couldn't confirm what you'd told them. 

Whereas, treating the detainees with respect, trying to build trust, undermines the detainee's belief in his enemy's inherent evil.  It is likely that long exposure to the "enemy" will humanize him and convince the detainee that he and the interrogator aren't as far apart as previously believed.

The fallacy of the "ticking time-bomb" scenario which torture proponents use to soften opposition to torture is that if a detainee has information of an "imminent" attack, you need to know the anticipated timing of the attack, which you likely don't, and the detainee must be forced to give up the information quickly.  He actually knows how long he must resist torture to allow the attack to go off, and he knows the factual information about the attack, which you don't.  He can send your manpower off on wild-goose chases in a situation in which time is of the essence.  In other words, the situation in which torture advocates try to prove the necessity of torture is actually the least-likely time in which torture would ever work.  The person being tortured holds all the cards, and in his mind is engaged in a noble struggle against evil opponents.  The torturer is making it less likely that he will get his information.  So far, I have not seen any evidence that utilizing tactics used by tyrants throughout history to get forced confessions from political opponents has ever produced usable intelligence anywhere outside of the obviously fantasy world of 24, where one man is able to stop years of planning in a single day.  Dick Cheney and his henchmen should be tried for their crimes.

Update:  Andrew Sullivan discusses Cheney's campaign:

So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya. When these Bush administration fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is definitively found to have been counter-productive in their lifetimes, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy will be exposed once again as unnecessary, un-American, unproductive, and a violation of core human values.
Cheney calls investigations into war crimes that went beyond the authorized torture techniques "an outrage." Well, he would, wouldn't he? He knows where the war crimes trail ends up - in his office. And he knows where he should be if we were governed by the rule of law: in jail. The real outrage is that he is still walking free - and doing all he can to entrench torture in the American way of war.

I've got to agree.  Cheney is the worst of the worst, and a giant coward.

May 9, 1941, British Capture Enigma Machine

Brad DeLong, quoting Wired:

May 9, 1941: German Sub Caught With the Goods: 1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret. The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Several versions of the Enigma machine existed, but the working principle -- a rotor system activated using a keyboard -- was the same. The machine itself had been around since the early 1920s and was used by other nations, too, although it is most closely associated with Nazi Germany. The Enigma used by the German army was decrypted as early as 1932 by Polish cryptographers, who later passed their methodology along to the British and French. In light of subsequent events (the Germans drove a Franco-British expeditionary force out of Norway and then crushed the French in a six-week campaign in 1940), the military value of this early intelligence is debatable.

VE Day

66 years ago today, the war in Europe ended.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Two things.  First, The Fateful Choice, at the Middle East Research and Information Project:

There is nothing new about torture in warfare, even as waged by democracies. What is new (at least in the modern era) is the brazenness with which torture’s proponents have asserted its compatibility with democracy and the rule of law. The Bush administration’s tangle of poor legal argumentation in support of its torture policy need not be rehearsed; the Obama administration was right to rubbish the lot. It has been disgusting, therefore, to see Bush officials emerge from the woodwork to suggest that finding bin Laden came about through torture. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, told FOX News that “anyone who suggests that the enhanced techniques, let’s be blunt, waterboarding, did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence, just isn’t facing the truth.” His fellow Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, went one step further: “Osama bin Laden would not have been captured and killed if it were not for the initial information we got from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.”
A former top military interrogator in Iraq, who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, has corrected the record by insisting that torturing detainees produces “limited information, false information or no information.” As Alexander and others note, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the September 11 attacks (who, incidentally, was captured at home in a commando raid, not on a battlefield, with a nudge from another $25 million bounty), blurted out nothing of value despite being waterboarded 183 times. He was confronted with the nom de guerre of a courier -- the one whose trail eventually led to bin Laden -- and claimed he had “retired” from al-Qaeda. The nom de guerre and all subsequent actionable leads were obtained from other sources through old-fashioned detective work. These facts have led Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to contradict Rumsfeld and King, saying: “So far, I know of no information that was obtained, that would have been useful, by ‘advanced interrogation.’” And when the CIA tortured Abu Faraj al-Libbi, another al-Qaeda courier who would have known others, he proffered a fake name that sent the manhunt on a wild goose chase. Torture is thus likely to have delayed the apprehension of al-Qaeda’s master terrorist.
The utility of torture is beside the point, in any case; torture is repellent and degrading of those who practice it as well as those subjected to it. It is also manifestly illegal, under both US and international law. As anyone who pays attention knows, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere swept away what remained of the post-September 11 wars’ moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Along with the Bush administration’s deceptions, arrogant doctrines of US dominance and disdainful asides to the effect that “we don’t do body counts,” torture poisoned all of the wars’ fruits, even turning bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the ugliest caricatures of Arab anti-imperialism, into heroes to some.

This torture was disgraceful and produced misleading and detrimental information, and yet Republicans still defend it and would do it again if they are ever put back into power.  This paper utterly destroys our choices in the war against terror.  It is a must-read.

Second, Edward Harrison has this chart in his article about how much banks in Germany are owed by the periphery states of the Eurozone:

That is stunning and I don't see how they will get that all back.  It is more a matter of how much they lose how quickly.

The Republican Torture Meme

All the folks claiming that torture helped us locate Bin Laden have gotten Andrew Sullivan's blood up:

Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history.
So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.
On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

Exactly, but it must be emphasized, KSM was waterboarded 183 times, and didn't give up the information about the couriers.  He finally gave that information up several months after the Bush administration quit using the waterboard.  Torture doesn't work, and even if it did, it is evil and immoral.  People who use torture are sadists, cowards or both.  The Bush administration was both.  Dick Cheney is the biggest coward and sadist.

Navy SEAL Pay Versus Wall Street

Dean Baker notes that ABC News mentioned Navy SEALS get paid about the same amount as school teachers.  He compares their pay to pay on Wall Street:

That is one possible comparison. There are other possible reference points. For example, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both pocket around $20 million a year. This means that they make almost twice as much in a day as a Navy Seal earns in a year. Not many bank heads have to worry about getting shot in the line of duty.
Of course some Wall Street types do even better. Hedge fund manager John Paulson reportedly pocketed $5 billion last year. If we assume a 3000 hour work year (presumably he had to put in some overtime), Paulson had to work about 2 minutes to earn as much as a Navy Seal does in a year. 

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: McClatchy: How bin Laden died: PsyOps in Action?.  This is straight out of the Republican playbook:

White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan provided the gripping detail Monday, when he told reporters that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield during the raid. The account gave the perfect hook for story after story after story after story. Every story, of course, furthered the fatal final image of the coward Osama bin Laden, cowering in fear. As Slate's estimable David Weigle put it:

"So, the admirer of bin Laden has to reckon with the idea that he spent his last moments hiding behind his wife."

Perfect! One couldn't ask for a better image!
Now, it turns out this vivid detail is, well, false. So maybe Brennan erred in the heat  of battle, right?
Or, maybe he did his job: planting in the public's mind the notion of bin Laden dying a coward's death, like James Cagney in that movie about the gangster going to the electric chair. It's always the first impression that lasts, so the after-the-fact corrections really won't unsettle what the public already "knows" about the event.
Bin Laden=coward, for all time.
Undermining the manhood of one's enemy is standard practice in the psychological operations playbook; witness, e.g., rumors that Panama's Manuel Noriega was fleeing U.S. forces while dressed as a woman, way back in the day. Assignment: come up with other examples of how Iraqi and Al Qaeda leaders have been belittled at their moment of capture or death.
Or, maybe it's more complicated than manipulation. Maybe the error really a case of what they say about war -- the first reports are always wrong -- combined with the juiciness of the details that matched what Brrennan wanted to believe. 

The example of that in the Iraq War:  Saddam Hussein's massive underground complex and dozens of body doubles.  We got television graphics of the underground bunker he would supposedly be hiding in, but after the troops got to town, we saw a lot of palaces, but I never was able to find actual photos of this massive bunker.  Likewise with the body doubles.  Supposedly there were dozens, but I never heard of an instance where we ever found one or interviewed one.  I believed then and still believe it was all propaganda to convince the American peopel he was a coward.

Correction:  Saddam's bunker.  Not exactly the bunker built at the Greenbriar.

Also, Yves highlights this:

U.S. Regulators Face Budget Pinch as Mandates Widen New York Times. This is pathetic:

On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor, a group of employees from the commodities watchdog [CFTC] rode Mega Bus both ways, arriving late to their meeting despite a 5:30 a.m. departure. The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.

No wonder businesses rob this country blind, Republicans want them to.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: NightWatch20110502, at kforcegov:

Pakistan-US: Comment: Bin Laden and a son are dead, killed in a firefight by US Navy SEALS carried in two helicopters to Abbottabad, Pakistan, just 35 miles north of Islamabad. The US commandos took custody of his body to prove he is dead and got away safely.

News services quoted unidentified US officials that the body was prepared for burial according to the Muslim ritual. Readers might wonder who gave such an order and why.

The Abbottabad location is important for two reasons. Bin Laden could not have lived in a compound in Abbottabad without official Pakistani government sustenance. Abbottabad is an upscale area and a garrison town, but not so large as to be impersonal. Bin Laden was living in protected luxury. Many people had to know that and probably will come forward in a little time.

On 7 December 2001, Bin Laden escaped from the tunnels in Tora Bora, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, with the help of a local warlord named Hazrat Ali, who betrayed US forces who had hired him to help capture bin Laden and is now a member of the Afghan Parliament for Nangarhar. Bin Laden and his gang crossed the Tora Bora mountains to Parachinar, Pakistan, where a Pakistan Army brigade was deployed to ensure his capture if he crossed the border. They failed, of course. He headed east to Kohat, another Army garrison town and disappeared.

The distance from Kohat to Abbottabad is several hundred kilometers by road, but the two towns are part of the Pakistan Army network of garrison towns in the northwest. Bin laden reportedly moved around in the northwest,  but one inference is that bin Laden has been in the safe keeping of the Pakistan Army for a decade. The news reports suggest the compound was specially built for him and his enterprise, which had to have been subsidized by Pakistan and, through Pakistan, by US aid to Pakistan.

Secondly, his compound could not have been attacked from Afghanistan, him killed and his body taken by US Navy SEALs flying US helicopters so close to Islamabad without official Pakistani government cooperation. The US insisted Pakistan played no part in the operation and that the team flew from Afghanistan. That clearly is a cover story for Pakistani public consumption to try to avert overwhelming anti-Pakistan and anti-US demonstrations, which are probably inevitable in any event.

Abottabad is not some remote village on the border. It is a large town in eastern Pakistan, on the main road to Kargil and the north as well as to Muzaffarabad and Pakistani Kashmir to the east. It is northeast - towards India - of Islamabad and within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital which is protected by the Pakistani integrated air defense system. Nothing can fly in that region without detection and without permission from the Pakistan Air Force, even from Afghanistan.

The conclusion is inescapable that the Pakistan Army protected bin Laden and recently decided to give him up, rather than sacrifice the Army's relationship with the US. The terms are not known as yet, but there certainly is a trade in which bin Laden was sacrificed. The trade might involve an end to US drone attacks across the border, which humiliate the Pakistan Army, or a new coordination regime for drone attacks into Pakistan.

Realpolitik sure is a dirty business.  The entire report, covering fighting in Afghanistan, with notes from Libya is very interesting.  I just found this discussion of the US-Pakistan-Bin Laden triangle interesting.  It does raise some very interesting questions about quid pro quos.  Maybe we are hearing the true story, but it doesn't sound very likely to me.  Either Pakistani defenses aren't much for Indian to worry about at all, or they knew we were coming, and they let us.

Torture DIDN'T Get Key Intelligence

Washington's Blog guest blogging at naked capitalism:

There’s a new meme widely circulating today claiming that torture was okay after all, because it helped us locate and kill Bin Laden. See this, this, this and this.
As ABC News notes:

The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.
“We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,” said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.

But as ABC notes in the next paragraph:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

Torture apologists are trying to defend themselves and give Bush credit for this success.  For one, Bush didn't follow it up.  For another, torture does not work.  Treating people like human beings does work.  Torture is immoral and a war crime for which Japanese soldiers were tried after World War II.  There is no reason that the U.S. should have ever used torture.

How To Cut Defense Spending

All Things Considered interviewed Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor:

This year the U.S. is expected to spend $700 billion on defense. That's twice what was spent in 2001, and as much as is spent on the rest of the world's militaries combined.
Defense is the U.S. government's biggest discretionary expenditure, but given the level of the national debt — and the drive to reduce government spending — calls are louder than ever to find cost savings.
Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor says there are ways to reap major savings when it comes to defense. He recently wrote about the subject in an article titled "Lean, Mean Fighting Machine" for Foreign Policy magazine. He tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that the U.S. simply cannot afford "wars of choice."
"Emphasis on choice," Macgregor says. "If you look at all of the interventions that we have launched since 1945 — beginning with Vietnam in 1965 and moving forward — none of them have changed the international system at all, and none of them have directly benefited us strategically."
World War II was the last military event that really had a strategic global impact, he says. "Americans need to understand that these wars of choice, these interventions of choice, have been both unnecessary, counterproductive, strategically self-defeating and infinitely too expensive for what we can actually afford."

Unfortunately, with one of our political parties being afraid of being called pussies by the idiots and fools in the other party, who only want to spend more on defense, I don't think this will go very far.  Plus, the cuts in defense would increase unemployment immensely.  I'm pretty sure we won't address this issue until it is too late.  In other words, I don't figure on selling my defense stocks yet.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Manning, Obama and U.S. Moral Leadership, by Glenn Greenwald:

On December 15, when I first reported the inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention, I did not assign any blame to -- or even mention -- Barack Obama. Although, as Commander-in-Chief, Obama was technically responsible for Manning's treatment, there was no evidence that he even knew about it, let alone planned it. But since then, the Manning controversy exploded into national prominence and Obama has explicitly defended the treatment, leaving no doubt that it directly reflects on who he is as a leader and a person.
For that reason, as The Guardian reports this morning, a letter signed by "more than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars" that "includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields" -- featuring "Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law"; who "taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign"; and "joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago" -- not only denounces Manning's detention but also the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner's personal responsibility for it:

It is truly embarrassing how Obama is allowing the military to treat Manning.  The entire "War on Terror" has been terrible for civil liberties, and the fact that the U.S. has engaged in torture is criminal.  People in leadership should be on trial.

Bad News From Northern Ireland

This:

Northern Ireland police say a 25-year-old officer has been killed by a booby-trap bomb placed under his car. Neighbors of the victim say the car was put ablaze by the blast in a neighborhood of Omagh. They say the victim had only recently joined the police force.
Since 2007, Irish Republican Army dissidents have planted dozens of booby-trap bombs under the private cars of police officers. The bombs usually fail to detonate and had killed nobody until Saturday.
Previously, two policemen have lost their legs in attacks in May 2008 and January 2010.
IRA dissidents committed the deadliest single bombing of the Northern Ireland conflict in Omagh in August 1998, when car bomb detonated amid a crowd. Twenty-nine people, mostly women and children, were killed.

The Real IRA and Continuity IRA continue to threaten the calm in the tenuous peace that has settled over the region since the Good Friday Accords and the Provos disarmament.  Hopefully the peace will survive and grow stronger.  Another report stated that the victim was a Catholic who had recently joined the PSNI, and the attack was intended to undermine efforts to recruit Catholics into the Northern Ireland police force.

Long Term Effects

Parker Donham talks about how September 11 changed the U.S.:

The vastly greater compound disaster now convulsing Japan lacks the dastardly element of human agency that made 9/11 so reprehensible, but in magnitude of destruction, death toll, and potential for permanent damage, it dwarfs the September 11 attacks. What's happening is not merely awful, but Biblical in scope. In yesterday's Times, Norimitsu Onishi wondered how it will change Japan:

Will it... be a final marker of an irreversible decline? Or will it be an opportunity to draw on the resilience of a people repeatedly tested by calamity to reshape Japan -- in the mold of either the left or the right? This disaster, like the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, could well signal a new era.

I'm no Japan hand, but like all Canadians, proximity makes me something of an expert on the United States. (As Pierre Trudeau memorably told Washington's National Press Club in 1969, "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.") From this vantage point, America's response to the atrocities it suffered on September 11 has been a dismaying combination of self-indulgence, official bullying, and evisceration of the freedoms that make the US a beacon for the world.

If Osama Bin Laden had a checklist of dumb things he hoped the U.S. would do in response his attack, the boxes have all been ticked. From the trivial (the seventh inning stretch song switch) and the merely obnoxious (the prison guard approach to airport security ably chronicled by our sponsor) to the reckless (three foreign wars launched on borrowed money without considering what comes next.) and the totalitarian (Abu Ghraib, Maher Arar,* Omar Khadr,* and now, Bradley Manning), America has done itself far greater damage than  Al-Qaeda could have dared hope.

I am glad that he mentioned playing "God Bless America" at the seventh inning stretch (done on Sunday's in Cincinnati).  I don't care if they continue to do that at Yankees games, but it is stupid to continue to do it in Cincinnati.  But seriously, the torture and stupid wars and loss of civil liberties are unnecessary, as terrorism is such a small threat to this country.  We need to move on, and the 10th anniversary of September 11 would be a good time for it.  Bring back September 10.