The yanks have a No-Fly list which is supposed to stop terrorists getting on an aeroplane. Sounds fair enough, right? Well get this, there’s 44,000 names on the list! Including 14 of the 19 terrorists who died on 9/11, the President of Bolivia, Saddam Hussein (like he’ll be flying anywhere) and some Nazi sympathizer who’s been dead for 10 years.

CBS’s 60 Minutes got a copy of the list and checked it out:

The first surprise was the sheer size of it. In paper form it is more than 540 pages long. Before 9/11, the government’s list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just 16 names; today there are 44,000. And that doesn’t include people the government thinks should be pulled aside for additional security screening. There are another 75,000 people on that list.

And here’s the best bit: because the list gets circulated to airline desks, the CIA refuses to put actual, suspected terrorists on it because it’s not secure enough! What a fucking farce! You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

From: CBS’s 60 Minutes

The yanks have signed into law the Military Commissions Act, allowing the CIA to continue to torture people abroad, and also denying ‘enemy combatants’ the right to a fair trial (habeus corpus).

The provisions of Bush’s new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that’s the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, anyone labeled an “enemy combatant” – again, by whom; by Bush? – can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of “war on terror,” but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.

On the plus side, you can now buy these t-shirts: Habeus Corpus: don’t be taken from home without it ;-)

Also, they have updated their space policy document and decided that they pretty much own space.

“The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests,” it says.

A study done by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published today in the Lancet, claims that, since the US, Britain and Australia invaded Iraq, approximately 655,000 more civilians have died than would have been the case if there was no invasion. To put this in perspective, that’s over twice as many as Saddam killed in his 25 years in power! So, the answer to the usual conservative pro-war justification “Do you really think the Iraqis would have been better off if we left Saddam in power?” would seem to be a resounding “YES!”.

Download the paper.



Bloody liberal media!

via scot hacker

Coalition of the Willing my arse! Turns out the US threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age” if it didn’t sign up to the War on Terror™

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan’s intelligence director.

“The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age’,” Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

With friends like that, etc. etc.

Have a look at this: Death And Taxes

It’s a graph of what the US spends its discretionay budget on, ie: the bit of hte budget that Congree actually votes on. 64% of it goes towards military spending!!

Here’s a less detailed follow-up graph which covers the entire annual US Federal budget, showing that military spending is the single biggest item – even bigger than social security!

Wired has an article examining the likelihood of an American dying from various causes which the current hysteria in perspective…

TomDispatch has an excellent article on the deteriorating state of the US Army and the depths to which recruiters are sinking in order to sign up people for military service:

When the American war in Vietnam finally ground to a halt, the U.S. military was in a state of disarray, if not near-disintegration. Uniformed leaders vowed never-again to allow the military to be degraded to such a point.

A generation later, as the ever less appetizing-looking wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spiral on without end, an overstretched Army and Marine Corps have clearly become desperate. At a remarkable cost in dollars, effort, and lowered standards, recruiting and retention numbers are being maintained for now. The result: U.S. ground forces are increasingly made up of a motley mix of underage teens, old-timers, foreign fighters, gang-bangers, neo-Nazis, ex-cons, inferior officers and a host of near-mercenary troops, lured in or kept in uniform through big payouts and promises.

Now read Billmon’s comparison toThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Figures from the Irish passport office show huge increases in the number of Americans and British applying for Irish passports. The number of Americans applying has tripled since 2001 which is hardly suprising as half the world hates them. An American passport has to be one of the worst to travel on.

Several US websites extol the virtues of travelling on Irish passports pointing out that the republic’s long-established neutrality is a better guarantee of safety. “With an Irish passport you are at lower risk when travelling in areas of the world that are hostile to Americans,” explains ancestry.com. “Terrorists are far less likely to kidnap or attack an Irish citizen than an American.”

They’d better hope that ‘the terrorists’ don’t learn to differentiate between Irish and Amerian accents!

More surprising is the number of British applying, which nearly tripled over the last year, but I suppose that’s what happens when you sell your soul to the devil. The level of applications from Australians should be rising shortly as well then…

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, no evil shall I fear…

because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley I’ve got an Irish passport” ;-)

Researchers at Princeton’s Centre for Information Technology Policy have published a paper showing how lax the security is on a Diebold coting machine, and how easy it is to hack the system and steal an election.

For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

So that’s how Bush won Ohio!

Bruce Schneier has a good post up today warning that we’re behaving exactly the terrorists want:

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

An interesting post in which a chemist debunks reports in the paper claiming that the UK flight bombers intended to use acetone peroxides as their explosives.

The news this morning was full of stuff about “ordinary looking devices being used as detonators”. Well, if you’re using nasty unstable peroxides as your explosive material, you don’t really need any — the stuff goes off if you give it a dirty look. I suspect a good hard rap with a hard heavy object would be more than sufficient. No need to worry about those cell phones secretly being high tech “detonators” if you’re going this route.

A recent review of the Dept. of Homeland Security’s terrorist-catching performance has revealed that they’re focussing so much effort on the terrorist watch list that they’re increasingly failing to catch people with illegal documentation.

As CBP [Customs & Border Patrol] has stepped up its efforts to intercept known and suspected terrorists at ports of entry, traditional missions such as narcotics interdiction and identification of fraudulent immigration documentation have been adversely affected. Recent data indicates a significant decrease over the past few years in the interception of narcotics and the identification of fraudulent immigration documents, especially at airports.

So, if you really ARE a terrorist, get yourself some dodgy documentation and you now stand a better chance of getting in to the US than previously.

From: Bruce Schneier

It’s finally over bar the shouting. Israel has had their arse handed to them on a plate by Hizbullah, and been shown up as not the force everyone thought them to be. They failed in all their main objectives:

- Hizbullah is as strong as ever

- Hizbullah will still be right up against the border

- Hizbullah still has loads of rockets left

Sure, they demolished half the country, but that’s the easy part when you’re the only side with an air force, and it’s still a total fuck-up, since the rationale behind it was that it would piss off the local population and turn them against Hizbullah. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Not only did the non-partisan section of the local population swing overwhelmingly against Israel, so did huge amounts of the global population. Israel has been shown to be the overly aggressive bully that it really is, and it’s going to be a very long time before they manage to re-erect the “woe is me” facade they traditionally use to justify their actions.

Finally, now that the Lebanese side of things has died down, expect to hear reports of Israel’s dodgy actions which occurred in Gaza while the world was focussed on Lebanon.

The Caot Institute has a paper titled A False Sense of Insecurity (97KB PDF) which looks at the real risks associated with terrorism and compares them to risks encountered in everyday life.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

Kind of puts it all in perspective really. And for this the US has spent almost a trillion dollars on wars in Iraq & Afghanistan? Sounds like a complete waste of money to me… unless, could it really all be about oil?? ;-)

The article also makes the point that we are letting the terrorists by becoming unnecessarily worried and that our governments, particularly the US Government, are deliberately inflaming public opinion:

What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.”

Or, as John Howard likes to say, “Be alert, not alarmed”. However, while this approach would be admirable, and certainly preferable to the current one, it would probably fail as the general public has an inability to understand relative risk. The article notes that an American’s odds of dying on an airline flight is around 1 in 13 million. You would get the same odds in a car, on the safest roads, after only driving 11 miles! Worth a read.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier

Juan Cole, and one of his readers, have come up with a theory of what is really going on in the Middle East, and it all centres on Iran’s oil & gas reserves.

In a worst case scenario, Washington would like to retain the option of military action against Iran, so as to gain access to its resources and deny them to rivals. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, however, that option will be foreclosed. Iran may not be trying for a weapon, and if it is, it could not get one before about 2016. But if it had a nuclear weapon, it would be off limits to US attack, and its anti-American regime could not only lock up Iranian gas and oil for the rest of the century by making sweetheart deals with China. It also might begin to exercise a sway over the small energy-producing countries of the Middle East. (The oil interest would explain the mystery of why Washington just does not care that Pakistan has the Bomb; Pakistan has nothing Washington wants and so there was no need to preserve the military option in its regard.)

Even an Iranian nuke, of course, would not be an immediate threat to the US, in the absence of ICBMs. But the major US ally in the Middle East, Israel, would be vulnerable to a retaliatory Iranian strike if the US took military action against Iran in order to overthrow the regime and gain the proprietary deals for themselves.

In the short term, Iran was protected by another ace in the hole. It had a client in the Levant, Lebanon’s Hizbullah, and had given it a few silkworm rockets, which could theoretically hit Israeli nuclear and chemical facilities. Hizbullah increasingly organizes the Lebanese Shiites, and the Lebanese Shiites will in the next ten to twenty years emerge as a majority in Lebanon, giving Iran a commercial hub on the Mediterranean.

China and India could get Iran, and Iran could get Lebanon, and as non-OPEC energy production decreases, the US and Israel could find themselves out in the cold on the energy front.

From The Open Voting Foundation:

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS — and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

So, Israel goes to war because Hizbullah captured a couple of its soldiers. Why is it then that all I see in the news is Lebanese civilians being killed, and civilian infrasturcture being destroyed, even in non-Shiite areas not on the border with Israel (and therefore not firing missiles at Israel)?

Then today, the Lebanese Daily Star reports that five of the country’s main factories, producing milk, pharmaceuticals, paper and packaging, got targeted and destroyed by Israeli strikes? Doesn’t sound like Hizbullah infrstructure to me?

Le Monde Diplomatique:

The 1949 Geneva Conventions state, in article 54 of their additional protocol: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. It is also “prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”. That means that the Israeli army’s latest offensive in the occupied territories amounts to war crimes; it includes the blockade of the civilian population and their collective punishment, the bombing of Gaza’s $150m power station, depriving 750,000 Palestinians of electricity in the intense summer heat, and the kidnapping on the West Bank of 64 members of the political wing of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. On 5 July the Israeli government said it would expand its military operation in Gaza.

Israel has violated another principle of international law in this offensive: proportionality. Article 51 of the protocol forbids “an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Can saving one soldier’s life justify destruction on this scale?

Israel & America are the two countries which I intensely dislike on the world’s stage right now. Individuals from each country are no more likely to be personable, or arseholes, than individuals from any other country, including my own, but both governments are scum.

The U.S. under Bush bleats long and loud about spreading “freedom and democracy”, all the while dismantling protections from government intrustion at home and abroad, and demonstrating with their every action that democracy doesn’t mean ‘of the people, for the people and by the people’, it means ‘whatever government will best serve the will of the US’. So much for the Founding Fathers and their vaunted Constitution.

As for Israel, their government’s actions are disgraceful and bring shame on their nation. The state of Israel certainly has a right to exist and its citizens have a right not to be subjected to rocket attack and suicide bombings, but equally the state of Palestine has a right to exist, and the Palestinians also have a right not to have Israeli snipers killing their children, Israeli helicopter gunships firing missiles into apartment blocks and Israeli artillery shells killing families at the beach.

What is doubly depressing about Israel’s conduct is that it is a nation whose very existence is a direct result of the persecution of Jews throughout Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, yet the descendants of those very same persecutees now spend their days, either directly (as government or military officials) or indirectly (by electing said government) persecuting and subjugating millions of Palestinians. How can a population for whom being victims of persecution is such a recent, vivid memory, and part of their psyche, turn around and allow their government to engage in essentially the very same behaviour?

Seymour Hersh has an article in the New Yorker outlining the US military’s unease at the current war planning being focused on Iran by the White House.

Several current and former officials I spoke to expressed doubt that President Bush would settle for a negotiated resolution of the nuclear crisis. A former high-level Pentagon civilian official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the government, said that Bush remains confident in his military decisions. The President and others in the Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill “seemed like a Texan to me. He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”

That’s all we need. The village idiot who thinks he’s Churchill.