Wampum

What is 5.5%?

So just how crazy is Dr A. Q. Khan? Crazy enough to salt centrifuges with uranium enriched to 54 per cent and then fob them off on the Iranian civilian nuclear enrichment program? Crazy enough to move centrifuges salted with uranium enriched to 36 per cent from Pakistan to Iran? Apparently so. At least the IAEA has just come to that conclusion, after forensic backtraces of the contaminants.

The US NRC Fact Sheet on uranium enrichment, and on enrichment via gassious diffusion. The NRC doesn't maintain a fact sheet on gas centrifuge, the prevailing enrichment technique in Europe, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and Iran.

I'm not going to lose sleep, or even feel a moment's compulsion to see what the "real journalists" are writing about Iran's nuclear program tomorrow. I doubt it will be substantively changed from yesterday. It must be absolutely groovy to be able to write a veins-in-the-teeth piece about the Iranian covert nuclear weapons program threat and have your fundamental claim refuted by the IAEA the very next day and to know that you don't have to publish a correction the day after that.

T

It is a word impossible to say. Congressional Committees. Angry men in dark suits and narrow ties.

Someone is burning US intel assets. An al-Qaida regional communications officer (Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan). Two Federal moles in Arab upstate New York (Yassin Muhiddin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain). An al-Qaida operations officer (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani). NSA intercepts and national technical capabilities. CIA covert officers and HUMINT/I capabilities.

I'm concerned that there may be agency in these acts. Agency beyond incompetence, the normal signature of this administration. Agency beyond managing the news cycle, the normal responsive media ploys of many administrations. Agency beyond institutional friction, a normal problem even without the "Homeland Security" re-org [1].

The net effect is hardening al-Qaida, and softening the United States. Perhaps it is just a series of coincidences, the weekly media gaming of a regime to dumb and venal to govern with consent or campaign on the issues, and not a planned covert reduction of defense, but that appears to be what is in fact happening.

I'm concerned that the Bush regime may be dismanteling, not constructing, the structure of our mutual defense. The political exploitation by the BC04 campaign of the burning of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan is being discussed in several contexts -- even on Democracy Now, but only as an isolated event, not as one in an increassingly troubling, and increassingly frequent series of similar events, each of which makes attacks on the US more likely, and more likely to achieve some or all of the intents of the attackers. It is as if Kim Philby has moved into the Occupied West Wing, and is managing to make "mistakes" effecting the DoD's theater intel ops, its NRO-based intel product, the DoJ's domestic intel ops, ... and eventually the Coast Guard's perimeter defense.

Update: Bush has nominated a political operative as Director of the CIA. I'm with former Director Turner on this.

[1] Suggestion to the K/E campaign. That re-org may have passed its sell-by date, and two paragraphs on unscrambling the bureacratic omlette may resonate in the standard stump. Try it in a focus group.

Glowing, er Whistling in the Dark

I was amused this morning by a piece in the IHT by someone from the Kennedy School at Harvard on Iran and Nukes and Nukes and Iran and the usual argle-bargle. Then this flops over the transom: Pakistan is cooperating with the IAEA and Pakistan isn't going to allow IAEA inspectors onto Pakistani soil. The cite is the Daily Star which represents the IHT in all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Lebanon , Syria , Jordan , Egypt , Yemen and Iraq. Just to add to the irony.

So. There are slightly more than three nuclear devices stored in conditions inferior to the average defunct Maine paper mill (my partner says shoe factory) in receivership and guarded by "contract security" in the multi-national footprint of the former Soviet Union. Israel has tested, well, you get to guess how many (out of an inventory of 75–200). Pakistan has tested six (out of an inventory of 30–50). India tested three (out of an inventory of 30–35). Korea may have two devices. Iran has none.

The current working-draft of the casus belli (singular) for the work-in-progress Iran War is failure to allow IAEA inspections. It is a fraud, but then so were the casus belli (plural, in series or in parallel) for the Iraq War.

In the Fall term of 1973 I took an honors physics seminar in nuclear physics taught by Luis Alverez. We calculated the yeilds of fissile materials from the public data then available on the reactors in Israel. We came up with the number six.

So, after Kabul and Baghdad and Tehran its on to Islamabad. Bing? Bob? Got a roadmap?

Update: Oh crap: Read this.

Imputed competence

As usual, part of my morning is reading Juan Cole's IC (after making coffee, writing replies to the CTO of Melbourne IT on the ICANN registrar's list on the subject of just how much registrars should know about registrants, taking a stab at writing a letter of intent, helping Sam make yet-another-mess-o-eggs, taking out the trash, taking Jonah to school), and one thing stood out from Juan's coverage of the outing of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. The imputation of competence. Here it is:

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: Well, from what I can glean from all of this, they actually were able to get a lot of information to get the different addresses, the methods by which they were communicating over the Internet, and undoubtedly was a very productive and useful sting operation. It was positive, it was good. You're glad to hear we're infiltrating in that regard...

I doubt it, that is, I doubt that the team responsible for Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's communications via computer could pass muster in civil society. Did they propogate signed beaconing virii to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's immediate correspondants, to disclose the larger universes of data exchanging machines? Did they inject steganographic (digitally watermarked) images into the that universe? Did they extract the operational details, platform type, user profile, access patterns, ... the stuff of access ISP operator lfe? The infrastructure details ... the stuff of an infrastructure providers operational life?

I still recall when a Chief Scientist at the responsible agency called me, and disclosed that he could not protect a set of assets from what fortunately turned out to be a non-event. That event was interesting, if only for the wealth of details it produced about the operational Internet, rather like the response-to-nothing spasm Tom Ridge managed to induce last week in New York, and as Juan points out, principally accomplished the outing of the recently flipped al Qaeda communications officer Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan.

The political leadership in the DoJ, the FBI, even the NSA, and the folly of the HSD re-org, makes it profoundly unlikely that within Ft. Meade, and elsewhere, there is an information science infrastructure as sophisticated as the least successful on-line ad agency. I so look forward to the next government. The current one simply does not compute.

They Could Just Move to Britain

What kind of conservatism is practiced by the Bush campaign? Compassionate conservatism, of course. To appreciate exactly how compassionate the campaign really is, it is useful to hear them talk among themselves, unaware that outsiders are listening.

Via South Knox Bubba, by way of Lean Left, I discovered a July 29 Reuters report:

A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.

“Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.

The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark.

Of course, if she had truly been compassionate, she would have mentioned that they could also move to Britain.

Via P6, I discovered another Reuters story:

Traces of the anti-depressant Prozac have been found in Britain's drinking water supply, setting off alarm bells with environmentalists concerned about potentially toxic effects.

The Observer newspaper said Sunday that a report by the government's environment watchdog found Prozac was building up in river systems and groundwater used for drinking supplies.

Certain people appear to be quite concerned about Prozac in the water supply and perhaps with good reason. Not at our house. With an autistic child out of school for the last few months and in need of constant (and I mean absolutely constant) supervision, we consider it a feature, not a bug. Amphetamines might help, too.

Republican Logic

The New York Times has a long article about the cozy relationship between the current administration and the coal industry.

One issue is the regulation of the quantity of coal dust permitted in the air inside the mines. Breathing coal dust over an extended period of time can cause black lung resulting in sickness or premature death for coal miners. The Times reports:

In 1997, as a top executive of a Utah mining company, David Lauriski proposed a measure that could allow some operators to let coal-dust levels rise substantially in mines. The plan went nowhere in the government.

Last year, it found enthusiastic backing from one government official - Mr. Lauriski himself. Now head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, he revived the proposal despite objections by union officials and health experts that it could put miners at greater risk of black-lung disease.

The reintroduction of the coal dust measure came after the federal agency had abandoned a series of Clinton-era safety proposals favored by coal miners while embracing others favored by mine owners.

It is tempting to view Mr. Lauriski’s position as simply favoring the cheap production of coal even at the expense of the health of the miners. Mr. Lauriski, however, argues that he actually is concerned for the health of the miners and that allowing more coal dust is good for miner health. The Times reports:

Mr. Lauriski said the coal dust measure would improve miners' health by encouraging the use of equipment to limit how much dust miners breathe.

Against my better judgment, let's try to take that agument seriously. The argument seems to run something like this:

Coal dust is dangerous to miner’s health. If we reduce the amount of coal dust, we will reduce the risk and that will encourage miners to be careless with the use of respirators. That carelessness could cause harm to their health. If we increase the amount of coal dust, the risk of illness or death will be so great and so serious that miners will use additional equipment to protect themselves.

Therefore, by increasing the risk of harm, we are actually promoting the health of the miners.

The issue of coal dust is not the first time Republicans have made that type of argument. The FDA refused to allow the over the counter sale of Plan B, the morning after pill. Some of the opponents of such sales argued that the existence of a readily available morning after pill would make it more likely that some women (particularly young women) would engage in certain behavior that the opponents of Plan B thought was inappropriate (sexual relations outside of marriage). We should, the argument went, keep the consequences of such behavior high so as to discourage it. For the good of the young women, of course.

A similar argument would be that careless driving causes a lot of car wrecks and people get injured in those wrecks. Safety devices such as seat belts and air bags reduce the frequency and severity of injuries in car wrecks. Therefore, if we really care about the health of drivers, we should not require seat belts and airbags in cars. We should, in fact, ban them so that drivers will be more careful.

Hmm…, I think I was right in not taking the argument seriously.