High Crimes from Powell's Chief of Staff

Colonel Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has bammed up the rhetoric a notch, saying that Bush has committed high crimes by taking us to war with Iraq for specious reasons. You can listen to the audio of the interview here.

That's a died-in-the-wool military Republican calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

I doubt impeachment will happen, since installing Nancy Pelosi as the President of the United States would, shall we say, challenge the optics. Despite impeachment's improbability, it is called for. This President broke the law for years with the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, and there must be accountability. Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, it's hard to put together an airtight case on the WMD issue, but the NSA program is a lock. Violating this law is a felony, and they've admitted to the crime. If we are to preserve the Republic, the rule of law must be preserved.

Reasons for Blogging

The incomparable Firedoglake offers advice on how to build a successful blog.

Excellent advice, I'm sure. However, I'm not interested in those goals. I do this for other reasons. My drive is mostly bound up in a pure enjoyment I have for the writing itself, and the homologous desire to improve the skill. Really, at the heart of it is my delight in using my brain for thinking about tangly things, because it's fun, I'm good at it, and this way I get to put my money where my mouth is with predictions and the like. Of course, I also enjoy being part of the movement, and translating these intellectual gymnastics into real world change - mostly through voter registration. What I am not looking for is to turn this blog into my job, or even any form of revenue source. That would tie me down to a regular update schedule, and my life is too incredible for something like that.

As you may notice, none of those goals necessitate self-identification, hence the anonymity. Keep it that way. :)

Rudy the Farmer Hater.

Rudy's campaign has been caught in what would be a career ending gaff for a Democrat:

Last weekend Deb and Jerry VonSprecken of Olin received a call from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s campaign office asking them if they would be interested in holding a campaign rally on May 4, after she had donated to his campaign.

“We thought it would be an honor and agreed,” said Jerry.

Because I'm citing it, you know it doesn't end well. You should read it yourself, but I'll give away the punchline: the farmers were too poor to warrant a visit.

Incidentally, they shouldn't have been surprised that this farmer's family wouldn't be covered by the Inheritance Tax, since almost zero privately owned farms are large enough to incur the tax. It really is a tax only on the very-wealthy.

Romney Gave to Planned Parenthood too!

Oh dear!

Former governor Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, gave a $150 donation to the abortion-rights group Planned Parenthood in 1994, at a time that Romney considered himself to be effectively "pro-choice," the Romney campaign confirmed today. Campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said Mrs. Romney has no recollection of the circumstances under which she donated the money…read on

Wow. That'll be a stumbling block. Remember that this is occurring just a week after Giuliani decided to fully embrace his pro-choice position because of donations to the same group The rain just keeps falling for the Republicans.

Hello Fred Thompson.

Cheney the Enforcer

11 House Republicans met privately with President Bush recently to make it clear that their support for the Iraq War would not last forever. It was reportedly a "frank" discussion, which sounds to me like Bush got an earful, and it represents a seachange in how Republicans are dealing with the President on this war. At the end of the surprising report comes confirmation that Cheney has been sent to Iraq to bring the pain:

One congressman said, “How can our sons and daughters spill their blood while the Iraqi government goes on vacation?” The president responded, “The vice president is over there to tell them, do not go on vacation.”

How can our boys die while they go on vacation?

Iraqi Government Wants Us Out

Things like this have been happening in the Iraqi government for a while now:

On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

It's a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country's civil conflict, and at times it's been difficult to arrive at a quorum)....

We have said again and again that we are in Iraq with the consent of the sovereign government, and that if the Iraqis asked us to leave, we would gladly show ourselves the door. The momentum is very much in the wrong direction on that score, and if they give us any reason to claim the defeat there wasn't our fault, I expect us to jump at the opportunity.

Vacations Bring the Cheney

Remember the Iraqi government's planned vacation that has been causing so much anger back here in the States? Well, I nearly called it by saying we would have to send an enforcer to make an offer they couldn't refuse. If only I had guessed it would be the scariest guy in the Administration, Dick Cheney.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s surprise trip to Baghdad today was meant to deliver a tough message to the Iraqi government – put off your vacation plans and get back to work.

U.S. officials have been livid since discovering that Iraq’s fledgling parliament – hardly a hive of activity in the first place – was planning to take a two-month summer recess, postponing work on a bill spelling out how oil money would be shared among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian groups or a law authorizing new regional elections.

Bam. Now let's see just how seriously this government takes its sovereignty.

Optimal Babyfication

My God!

The time of year a woman conceives may influence the future academic performance of her child, according to research reported this week at the Pediatric Academic Societies' annual meeting.

When researchers linked standardized test scores of 1,667,391 Indiana students in grades 3 through 10 with the month in which each student had been conceived, they found that children conceived May through August scored significantly lower on math and language tests than children conceived during other months of the year.

The correlation between test scores and conception season held regardless of race, gender, and grade level.

I'm keeping this one in mind. That's some useful science, right there. No babyfication in the summer!

The Excercise of Hegemony

The Sunnis seem to have finally realized what was always painfully obvious - so obvious, it doesn't remotely deserve an I Called It - that the Iraqi constitution is not going to be amended in any meaningful way. Guess what? They aren't happy.

Iraq's top Sunni official has set a deadline of next week for pulling his entire bloc out of the government....Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi made his comments in an interview with CNN. He said if key amendments to the Iraq Constitution are not made by May 15, he will step down and pull his 44 Sunni politicians out of the 275-member Iraqi parliament.

"If the constitution is not subject to major changes, definitely, I will tell my constituency frankly that I have made the mistake of my life when I put my endorsement to that national accord," he said.

Specifically, he wants guarantees in the constitution that the country won't be split into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish federal states that he says will disadvantage Sunnis.

Remember that this is following on the heels of the Sadr Block withdrawing their cabinet ministers. The Iraqi government, always full of holes, is now disintegrating as we watch.

This is the point where your Secretary of State goes to the Vice President, smacks him in the face as hard as possible without touching him and says something like, "Listen, Tariq. What happens if you pull out of the government? What governmental framework would be left, to allow you to achieve your goal of preventing the loose federalism that the Iraqi Constitution enables? If you pull out, the government falls, and guess what? The de facto segregation and sectarian tribalism that remains will be a loose federal system. Your goals are lost forever. You would be a failure.

"And let's not forget what happens to you and your parliament friends, Mr. Vice President. You are the ultimate government collaborators - working directly with the American occupation. You've shaken George W. Bush's hand, for God's sake! Amongst the Sunni population especially, I expect that will be a dangerous life.

"Of course, there's only one way to achieve your goals. Only the path of order and dialogue can keep the nation together enough to ensure you and yours make bank. If you pull out and the government falls to the point where it can't even maintain a facade of operation, then we're gone soon after, and your life gets real scary, real fast. So stop this bullshit."

Hopefully a verbal beating of that flavor would be enough to scare them back in line. Exercising those kinds of leverage are the wages of hegemony, and if we don't use them in this case, where we're told the nation's future security is substantially at stake, what's the point of having that power?

But the sad thing is that this move does make some sense for the Sunni. What guarantee do they have that after American forces are gone the payments from oil redistribution will continue? Hell, some Iraqis will no doubt say that the Shiite's have no incentive to continue them. As we knew would be the case, generosity and equanimity are not miraculously springing to bloom in a bed sown with chaos, death, and hundreds of years of religious and tribal hatred. Go figure, huh?

Maybe if we just stay for another six months, the core dynamics will magically change. I'll do my part by clapping as loudly as I can. I support the troops, after all.

Wanted: Commander in Chief

When we first heard about the possibility of hiring a War Czar you should have heard how they pooh-pooh'd it in the White House press briefings. "No decision has been made about creating a new position," they said repeatedly, which translates as "we're not sure we can find anyone to take the job."

Now that the White House is searching for a "war czar," it begs the question of who has been coordinating U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan the past four years.

A team of West Wing players led by national security adviser Stephen Hadley has tried to keep turf-conscious agencies marching in the same direction on military, political and reconstruction fronts. A few Bush aides say privately, however, that the White House probably should have recruited someone to oversee the war effort a year ago.

Critics say the administration's job of coordinating the war has never gone smooth enough or fast enough. And now two key members of the White House team focused on the war are leaving.

"The problem is not broad strategy and policy, it's that the bureaucracy is so inefficient and there's been so little follow-up that the machine doesn't work," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said. He believes red tape in Washington is the biggest obstacle to winning in Iraq.

Ahhh, Newt Gingrich. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the Big-Ideas-Man of the Republican Party is savvy enough to understand that the real problem in Iraq is not a centuries old sectarian war, but filling out forms in triplicate. Reshuffling our bureaucracy is his grand plan for salvaging Iraq, yet he's seen as an intellectual giant that could swoop in and save the party from the likes of serial wafflers like Romney and Giuliani. Woe betide the Republicans if this benighted pablum spewer is their last best hope.

As for the substance of the War Czar position, the response is obvious: don't we already have a Commander in Chief? I think I have heard that we do. Perhaps he has the authority to cut through that bastard red-tape that Gingrich thinks is detonating EFPs in Baghdad? Or, if the President is too busy (perhaps, like Osama, he doesn't like to "think too much" about the Iraq War), perhaps the Secretary of Defense has some power? Or the Joint Chiefs?

The reason they can't find a taker for this position is as plain as day. They can't blame Bush, Gates, the Joint Chiefs, or General Petreus for the ever darkening cloud of looming defeat, so they need a fall guy. This War Czar wont change the dynamic in the war from Washington, because if that were possible it would have happened by now. Despite the fact that this government misled us into a terrible war doesn't mean that they relish the continued loss of American lives, so if shuffling bureaucracies could solve this, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I really can't imagine someone with a choice taking this job.

AACS hacked irevokably

AACS, the new encryption system designed by the movie industry to replace CSS in the new generation of high resolution DVDs, has already had one of its secret keys broken, despite the fact that there are barely any AACS-protected products yet on the market. This encryption key allows the No-Intellectual-Property types to make perfect copies of the new generation of DVDs. My response, as a cryptography guy myself, is "what took them so long?"

When the assault on AACS began, the first victory was won by the hackers who successfully extracted a secret hexadecimal key used to decrypt the movies inside the players into a viewable form. This, in itself, is not devastating, although it is an extremely expensive problem to fix. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) could simply revoke that one key from the keyspace and their problem is solved. Of course, all the HD-DVD players out in the world that use that key for decryption would not be able to play any movies factory-pressed from the date of revocation forward, and that's where the cost occurs. Annoying, yes. Devastating, no.

It is the nature of the attack used to discover that first secret key that makes this devastating. By inserting a modified chip into their player, they can observe the device's handshaking with the message and the invocation of the cryptosystem to verify and decrypt the video. From this chip they can obtain Volume IDs, from which they can derive an unlimited number of valid secret keys. According to the hackers (a most trustworthy group), the infrastructure they have in place cannot be destroyed without tearing the entire AACS encryption scheme to the ground and starting back from scratch. In the words of Elzar: "movie industry, Bam."

The funny thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if they had this hack completed months ago, when the announcement of it would have forestalled the rollout of this new technology. Instead, just as with the original DVD protection, CSS, they wait until the standards are all finalized and millions of players have shipped. At that point, there's really nothing to be done.

Interestingly, tying this back to governance, this little AACS episode represents a stunning victory against the utterly vacuous DMCA. Mass civil disobedience against dumb laws strikes me as a good thing. People have produced songs, T-shits, animated gifs, and heavily obfuscated programs containing these codes. You cannot suppress this speech, and it's pointless to try.

Success Finally Redefined!

We all know the redefined victory we're working towards in Iraq: "a country that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself." For quite some time it has been clear that this even this hollow, Iran-emboldening "victory" is beyond our reach. Well, today our President lowered the limbo bar a bit further:

Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that's what we're trying to achieve.

An "acceptable level of violence," indeed. I wonder, how many carbombs a week would we, as Americans, decide is "acceptable" to live with?

How long do you think we'll have to wait before a minimal and temporary decrease in violence renders a level declared "acceptable?" How many Americans will die in the interim?

AOL HaXored by L33t Kiddie

Check out this InfoWorld article about an absolute worst case security scenario - having such a huge organization that some know-nothing script-kiddie can seriously compromise your network. From a security professional's point of view, it's pathetic, especially considering AOL is not new to being attacked. These types of unsophisticated, basement-middleschooler attack can almost always be stopped by a competently enacted information security plan.

Unfortunately for the business world, this type of thing happens all too often. Valve, the developer for the hugely popular Half-Life series of games, was victimized as well, and they're a manageably small organization. In Valve's case, they had Steam, their brand-new encryption system stolen. This was the very system that was going to ensure that people could not steal their game. Ironic. Needless to say, they went many millions of dollars into the hole due to pushing the release date back enough to reengineer their IP-protection scheme. They missed the holiday launch. Ouch.

What unites these two hacks? The software monoculture. The fact that everyone under the sun uses Microsoft code draws the bad guys to the scene, and the closed-source, security-through-obscurity approach to security that Microsoft uses ensures an unending string of bugs that can lead to privilege escalation, and thereby to viruses, ad-ware, and these worst-case breakins. Although the problem is simple, the equally simple solution of MS avoidance is not possible.

In the case of Valve, the original attack was born through e-mail, since identifying a target's e-mail client is a breeze, and so many people use MS Outlook - a horrible pox on the security world. The bad guys ID'd the Outlook version, and then started sending malformed e-mails that would exploit a recently found Outlook bug. If Valve had simply used a different mail client - any open source client would do - they could have falsified their client-ids and been completely safe from e-mail born attacks. At that point, as long as they didn't use IE, kept virus-scanners on their computers and had a real firewall at the gateway, they would have been completely safe from all but the most skilled hacker or disgruntled insider.

So, the solution is not to avoid Microsoft software entirely, since that is impossible. Rather, simply avoid as much of it as you can. Use the operating system to ensure compatibility, and then eschew every one of their other products. In case you're wondering about replacements:

• Microsoft Office -> OpenOffice.org
• Internet Explorer -> Mozilla Firefox
• Outlook/Outlook Express -> Mozilla Thunderbird
• Messenger -> GAIM, Trillian

All of those are free, and all are open source.

I'd just like to add: Can't stop now cuz it's HaXor 4 Lif3!

Alternative Energy: Better All The Time

Canada is building a 40 MegaWatt solar power plant that will generate enough power to supply 10,000 homes in Ontario. Even in the frozen north it is now economically feasible, thanks to a dramatic decrease in the cost of photocells.

Conservatives are always saying that dealing with the grave national security threat posed by our reliance on subterranean oil would cripple our economy. I think just the opposite. People are going to get very rich, indeed, and everyone will win.

Odious Vacations and a Test of Iraqi Sovereignty

I know that we want Iraq to adopt many of the political values we have here in America, what with the democracy and all, but this is ridiculous. They've taken Bush's leadership to heart and are going on a summer vacation, critically pressing business be damned!

That's right, despite the total lack of political progress - the very progress that was this Surge's sole purpose to enable - the Iraqi government is going on a two month vacation... errr, I mean, "home work session." They have to consult with their constituents, of course, despite the fact that if they press too much flesh they're in serious danger of ending up blindfolded in someone's trunk. Furthermore, I'm not sure how much consultation they really require: "Oh, so you're saying you want the government to do something to insure security? Man, I sure am glad I went on this vacation to keep me grounded with the real concerns of the people!" Give me a break. Just tell it like it is, Parliament - that living in the bubble of the greenzone amidst the falling mortars is "hard work," and you need to go clear some brush to keep the ol' governing juices flowing.

I was stunned when I heard, frankly, but when I saw it confirmed on a brace of Sunday shows - once by the President of Iraq, I believe, on CNN - I was convinced I hadn't imagined it. If the Iraqis take the two month vacation they're talking about, that's it. The jig is up back here in America. Our boys are buying the Iraqi government time with their blood. Every day that goes by without action, more American lives are wasted for people that have no real value for the sacrifice. There aint no way that they can go on vacation without making progress toward political reconciliation. When they come back, there might not be any Americans waiting for them.

So, it's clear that I feel the moral calculus should compel the Iraqis to forgo their vacations. The real question is how our government will deal with this radioactive potato. The fact is that back here in the States this is a political catastrophe, and could spell the final death of support for this war. Nothing could send the message of the futility of our "strategy" so clearly. It will be interesting to see how we go about twisting arms to forestall the storm. I would expect us to go to the mat behind closed doors, eagerly issuing ultimatums. This is a case where even President Bush might support the "do it our way or we're leaving" threat, since this is an existential threat to the effort anyway.

Can we do this over the phone, or do we send an enforcer? This seems like a face-to-face confrontation to me. Let's see how much control of their internal affairs this "sovereign" government really has.

Condi the Criminal?

Congress mandates a yearly report from the State Department cataloguing and commenting on the international terrorist events of the preceding year. Over and over, we have seen how the amount of terrorism being perpetrated in the world is driven ever higher, with new records for violence seemingly every year. Needless to say, this report is always a political hot-potato, making headlines by putting the lie to Bush's strategy in the War on Terror, and our newest pending report promises the same. Given the increasingly one-sided political debate on Iraq and the current imbroglio over funding, this report couldn't have come at a worse time for the Bush White House. Surprise, surprise! To solve their political problem, the Bush Administration considered breaking the law:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year's edition, due to the extreme political sensitivities, several officials said. But ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or about the congressionally mandated deadline of Tuesday, the officials said.

Needless to say, you cannot ignore the will of Congress because it would be politically inconvenient to obey. At least, that used to be the case before the Bush Administration's theory of lawlessness took hold.

An Escalation After All, and Ruing Defeat

So, McCain gets his way on every front. It's no longer a temporary surge:

The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush's top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of President Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.

Remember that originally we were told that the new strategy would have to be showing tangible results by the summer - the "last chance." Then the deadline for that last chance was pushed back to the Fall. Now we're told that even by September we shouldn't expect real progress, because counterinsurgency work takes significant time and resources. Well, duh.

This is a sad day for McCain's presidential aspirations, since his only criticisms of the surge concerned its temporary nature and size - both of which have now been addressed, bringing the policy 100% under his ownership. In Iraq we've got a central government that is not central to national life, nor is it capable of governing even inside its small sphere of influence; Iraqi troops that we are no longer even attempting to replace us with, despite billions of dollars and years of training; a "National Unity" government that is not only frighteningly fractious, but also has not taken one step towards any of the critical acts of political reconciliation that are linchpins of our stated strategy. We are stalling furiously, forever pushing the moment of reckoning, when even the President and his 29%-supporters are forced to acknowledge the failure they have brought us in Iraq and the disastrous consequences that failure has had for America.

Please make no mistake - I am not rooting for defeat in Iraq, I am ruing it. That the Republicans gave us such a defeat is catastrophic.

They Stand Up, We Don't Stand Down

I know I've been lax by letting this go a few days without comment, but this major change needs to be entered into the record:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

Stand Up/Stand Down was the end game for Iraq - the talking point that would allow us to declare victory and go home without having to achieve the impossible victory we were once promised. You might naturally ask: "now that we're not standing up the Iraqi Army, what's the new end game?" Answer: we're supposed to "defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces." For those of you paying attention, that is precisely the military victory we're told is not possible.

In the immortal words of Country Joe, "1, 2, 3, What are we fightin' for?"

Rove Admits Playing into bin Laden's Hands

In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq.

"I wish the war were over," Rove said. "I wish the war never existed... History has given us a challenge."

"I think it was Osama bin Laden’s," Rove replied.

I've never agreed with Karl Rove more. I've said before that through the War in Iraq we've substantially accomplished bin Laden's strategic goals and ensured his relevance through boosted recruitment and cultural momentum. Rather than pursuing a global counterinsurgency, wherein the extremist elements are leveraged away from the surrounding population, thereby decreasing its support base and withering the movement to death, we pursued an ever-escalating regional conflict where we are increasingly seen as at War with Islam.

Picking the ground over which to fight is the concern of the engagement's commander. Generals plan campaigns, Colonels handle regions, Majors execute operations, and in every context the ground over which you will be fighting is critical to determining the outcome. Prepositioning your resources so that the ground is favorable to your side is a basic responsibility of command, so what does it say that our Chief Commander picked our ground so poorly? We're at war with the world's largest religion, in the world's most volatile region - a region our economy depends on utterly. This is brilliant work, Commander.

Iran helps Everybody!

File this under the ever-growing "unlikely" folder.

A senior US general has said that coalition forces in Afghanistan have intercepted Iranian-made weapons on their way to Taliban fighters.

Really? Like hell.

This follows on the hells of another Iranian-aid-to-our-enemies story we've heard recently. Namely, that the Iranians were sending armaments to the Sunnis in Anbar Province in Iraq (the Sunnis were using EFPs, after all).

There are so many reasons these stories are implausible. First, you'd have be living under a rock (or be a Republican congressman), to not know that Iran is Shiite and the Taliban is Sunni. That simple ethnic divide would be enough for me to call shenanigans on this statement from the US Army.

However, we also need to factor in the history of these specific groups. The government of Iran had been an enemy of the Taliban since its inception - they were yet another zealous enemy on Iran's borders (the first of their enemies we dispatched for them). Iran had been funding the Northern Alliance before we co-opted them to help us fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. As for Iraq, the Shiites of Iran have historically battled with the Sunni minority, both through total war and through clandestine efforts.

These stories, as I said, are just implausible. The Shiites of Iran are not helping the Sunnis of Iraq kill their Shiite brothers. The Administration should realize that when you have no credibility left, you shouldn't stretch it further.