Trashing Up the Weekend

By:  Friday June 8, 2012 6:15 pm

Since I’m a non-travelling Wheel this weekend (and since I’m batshit crazy about college baseball) I get the honor of writing the weekend sports trash talk. Lots of sports are on tap this weekend, as the NBA chooses its Eastern Conference sacrificial team to face the ascendant Oklahoma City Thunder who appear to have a rising dynasty. There’s the Belmont Stakes, now sadly deprived of the chance for a Triple Crown winner. And, the reason I’m not in Providence, there are the NCAA Baseball Super Regionals, which are already underway as I write.

Here’s another local Gainesville musician to kick things off. He’s a bit better known than last week’s group, but he somehow seems to be keeping the zombie theme alive into its second week. Note that from the video, this is clearly not happening in Gainesville, so Petty’s “I’m tired of this town” doesn’t apply to his hometown.

Before the sports trash gets started, I have to engage in a bit of trash on journalism and blogging. I’ve been hammering a lot on the “Daily Drone” issue in Pakistan, making the argument that many US drone strike have been as much about political retaliation as about hitting terrorists, even coming up with the headline “The Beatings Drone Strikes Will Continue Until Morale Improves” Today the Los Angeles Times finally caught up:

Expressing both public and private frustration with Pakistan, the Obama administration has unleashed the CIA to resume an aggressive campaign of drone strikes in Pakistani territory over the last few weeks, approving strikes that might have been vetoed in the past for fear of angering Islamabad.

/snip/

“They are trying to send a message: ‘If you don’t come around, we will continue with our plan, the way we want to do it,’ ” said Javed Ashraf Qazi, a retired Pakistani intelligence chief and former senator. It’s “superpower arrogance being shown to a smaller state…. But this will only increase the feeling among Pakistanis that the Americans are bent on having their way through force and not negotiation.”

And if that’s not enough, it turns out that yesterday Jonathan Turley even mostly ripped off my headline. Continue reading →


Why The DOJ Can’t Prosecute Banksters: Map of Clemens Investigation

By:  Friday June 8, 2012 4:51 pm

At a time when there are still no significant prosecutions of major players, banks and investment shops responsible for the financial fraud that nearly toppled the world economy and is still choking the US economy, we get an explanation why from an unlikely source – the Roger Clemens trial in Judge Reggie Walton’s courtroom in the DC District. During defense examination of FBI special agent John Longmire today, a map of the FBI/DOJ investigation of Roger Clemens, who was accused of lying about getting a few steroid shots in the late 90s and early 2000s, was displayed. We are now two full months into the second trial of Roger Clemens stemming from this investigation.

Any more questions on why DOJ cannot get around to prosecuting banksters??


Foreclosure Fraud: The Most Dangerous Panel in the World

By:  Friday June 8, 2012 10:32 am

They’ve scheduled DDay’s Netroots Nation foreclosure fraud panel–with Lynn Szymoniak, Malcom Chu, and Neil Barofsky–in a room with no streaming, and President Obama is holding a press conference to conflict with it. Which suggests this is the most dangerous panel in the world.

So I’m gonna liveblog it.

DDay introduces Barofsky as the first George Bush appointee to speak at Netroots Nation. Says Szymoniak made the name Linda Green famous. Chu is a Springfield MA foreclosure activist.

DDay: We told Eric Schneiderman’s Chief of Staff we could fit him in. I don’t see him here. We’ll put a seat here for Elijah. It occurs I could call this panel “Foreclosure Fraud, the first 5000 years.” Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, nothing has changed. Dissipation of a lot of the leverage that the regulators have.

Continue reading →


Alarming Rise in Military Suicides: More Than Double Rate in 1999

By:  Friday June 8, 2012 10:01 am

AP’s Robert Burns yesterday delivered sad news on a large rise in the rate of military suicides.  Just over a month ago, Burns discovered that the military has been systematically under-reporting “green on blue” attacks in Afghanistan by only providing reports on deaths and not reporting attacks in which soldiers are wounded or unharmed.

Burns notes that suicides have held at almost exactly one each day for a period of almost half the year and that this is a large increase over what had been lower, steady rates the past two years. Sadly, deaths by suicide far outnumber combat deaths this year:

Suicides are surging among America’s troops, averaging nearly one a day this year — the fastest pace in the nation’s decade of war.

The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan— about 50 percent more — according to Pentagon statistics obtained by The Associated Press.

/snip/

Because suicides had leveled off in 2010 and 2011, this year’s upswing has caught some officials by surprise.

/snip/

The 2012 active-duty suicide total of 154 through June 3 compares to 130 in the same period last year, an 18 percent increase. And it’s more than the 136.2 suicides that the Pentagon had projected for this period based on the trend from 2001-2011. This year’s January-May total is up 25 percent from two years ago, and it is 16 percent ahead of the pace for 2009, which ended with the highest yearly total thus far.

Burns notes that although numerous mental health and counseling programs have been put in place suicides continue at a very high rate. Contributing factors are discussed:

The reasons for the increase are not fully understood. Among explanations, studies have pointed to combat exposure, post-traumatic stress, misuse of prescription medications and personal financial problems. Army data suggest soldiers with multiple combat tours are at greater risk of committing suicide, although a substantial proportion of Army suicides are committed by soldiers who never deployed.

I thought it would be informative to find the rate of suicides before the ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. An AP article on military suicides from June, 2000 can be found here. It also was written by Robert Burns.

The suicides reported in that article for calendar year 1999 are broken down by branches of the armed services and in terms of deaths per 100,000 troops. The rates were 15.5 per 100,000 in the Army, 15 in the Marines, 11 in the Navy and 5.6 in the Air Force. Consulting this table of the number of active duty members of those branches, actual numbers come out to 65 suicides in the Army (although Burns noted there were 65 confirmed suicides and another 12 suspected suicides that are not included), 26 in the Marines, 41 in the Navy and 20 in the Air Force. That computes to a projected total of 152 suicides for calendar 1999. The total size of the force of active duty personnel for 1999 was 1,385,703.

Active duty forces now also total 1.4 million, so annual rates can be compared evenly. The rate for this year of 154 suicides in 155 days computes to a projected total of 363 suicides for this year. That suggests that after the decade of wars our armed forces have been asked to conduct, the suicide rate has more than doubled, going up by a factor of 2.4, from 152 per year to 363 while the force size has remained the same.

 


Traveling Wheels

By:  Thursday June 7, 2012 3:19 pm

Hello one and all, and greetings from lovely downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Marcy and I are both here for Netroots Nation; she has been in town since yesterday, and I just arrived this morning. We will both be here through Sunday afternoon.

So far Marcy and Jim have kept up regular posting, which is fortunate because I had a literal clusterfuck of problems rain on me yesterday which I was supposed to be providing content and getting ready to go. I have no idea what substantive posting we will do, so Jim may be piloting the ship. I’m a gonna guess he may want to be trash talking about Alabama, an SEC team, finally breaking through and winning the Women’s College World Series in softball. Credit where due, they rolled the two other best teams in the brackets, Oklahoma and ASU.

More importantly, if any of you are at Netroots, or in the vicinity, we would love to say hi. Leave a note here, or just find us – we are wearing stinking badges!

We will be around, but if there is any hot breaking news, and we don’t look to be around at the moment, put it up in comments and let fly with the analysis. In the meantime, since these Wheels are traveling, some traveling music for you from Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.


30 Ways to Shrink Intelligence Oversight

By:  Thursday June 7, 2012 11:44 am

Correction: I misunderstood a few things about this. First, this is the request from DNI, not what the Intelligence Committees have agreed to. And the House–which has taken up this request–did not accept all these requests (including the clearances audit). This post has been altered accordingly.

The DNI released their 2013 Intelligence Authorization request yesterday. Almost 10 pages of the 24 page document describe reporting that these “oversight” committees will no long require from the Intelligence Community. The bill starts by putting a default 3 year expiration on any new reporting requirements. And then it includes a list of 27 reports that the bill will eliminate and another 3 that it will modify.

And while some of the reports may well be redundant or outdated (the justification given for most of the changes), some seem really troubling. For example, the bill would eliminate a requirement–passed just three years ago–that the Administration audit and report (partially in unclassified form) the total number of security clearances and how long it takes to approve and reapprove those clearances. Here’s how the bill justifies eliminating such a report:

Justification: Section 506H includes two enduring reporting requirements. The requirement for a quadrennial audit of positions requiring security clearances should be repealed because the National Counterintelligence Executive, in partnership with other agencies with similar responsibilities, examines the manner in which security clearance requirements are determined more frequently than once every four years. Rather than submit a report regarding a quadrennial activity, the executive branch can provide more frequent briefings, as requested, if congressional interest persists.
With regard to the annual reporting requirement on security clearance determinations, the Executive Branch as a whole has made significant progress in expediting and streamlining the security clearance process since the passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, thus reducing the saliency of this report. This reporting requirement should be replaced by briefings, as requested, if congressional interest persists.

What this effectively does is eliminate one way for citizens to see at least the outlines and scope of our secret government. Rather than a partially unclassified report, instead, the intelligence community will brief Congress, rendering it not only secret, but eliminating some of the paperwork that can be FOIAed or archived.

The bill also would eliminate a requirement for the Director of National Intelligence and CIA Director to each provide an annual list of any advisory committees they’ve created, their subject, and their members. I’m guessing the proposed substitution–regular Congressional notifications and briefings–is probably not going to include the same level of detail. And given ODNI’s inadequate response to Electronic Frontier Foundation on an advisory committee as important as the Intelligence Oversight Board, I’m not all that confident it will provide adequate notice on more obscure advisory committees. Moreover, there is a history of advisory board members obtaining great influence and advantages from their position. Lists of members should be on paper somewhere.

Continue reading →


First Quarter Violence Down in Afghanistan: Progress or Harsh Winter?

By:  Thursday June 7, 2012 9:47 am

ANSO's data on Armed Opposition Group violence through the first quarter of 2012. (click on image for a larger view)

During his unannounced trip to Kabul today, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had the unfortunate timing to arrive on the worst day for civilian casualties this year. The Washington Post, however, gave plenty of room for Panetta to cling to the military’s “we’re winning” mantra despite a security situation so bad that his trip could not be announced in advance:

Panetta came to Afghanistan to confer with military leaders on plans to withdraw troops and deal with rising violence. He noted that despite the increase in bloodshed in recent weeks, overall violence was lower than in previous years.

“We have a tough fight on our hands” Panetta said. He reaffirmed the United State’s long-term commitment to Afghanistan and said he believed that commitment would help stymie the Taliban’s ambition.

Over at the New York Times, the headline proclaims “Panetta Visits Afghanistan Amid Mounting Violence” and the article opens by noting the civilian casualties:

Leon E. Panetta, the United States defense secretary, arrived in Afghanistan on Thursday, after the deadliest day for civilians this year and amid controversy over a NATO airstrike the day before in which Afghan officials say 18 women and children were killed.

The article goes on to note, however, that data for the first quarter of this year showed reduced civilian casualties but that reduction may be going away now:

Last week, the head of the United Nations Afghanistan office, Jan Kubis, said that in the first quarter of this year, civilian casualties had dropped for the first time since the United Nations began keeping statistics in 2007. That positive trend has appeared to be eroding in recent days. Another official in the office, James Rodehaver, said, “One thing we can say is that this has been the deadliest day of the year so far for civilians.”

The metric I have followed most closely in monitoring Afghanistan violence has been ANSO’s (Afghanistan NGO Safety Office) reports, and specifically their data on Armed Opposition Group activity. Their latest report (pdf) includes data for the first quarter and a chart summarizing trends in AOG violence over the years in Afghanistan appears above. As seen in the inset, ANSO sees a significant decrease in violence for 2012 over 2011. Their discussion of this decrease is revealing: Continue reading →


Gang Warfare to Protect Israel’s Secrets

By:  Thursday June 7, 2012 7:01 am

Easily the most overlooked line in David Sanger’s story on StuxNet is this one:

Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

It’s a sentiment he repeats in this worthwhile interview:

FP: There haven’t been thoughtful discussions about the consequences or the ethics or the international legal ramifications of this approach. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and you are confronted with this. Isn’t your first reaction, “How is them blowing up Natanz with a code any different from them blowing up Natanz with a bomb? And doesn’t that justify military retaliation?”

DS: Blowing it up with computer code, rather than bombs, is different in one big respect: It very hard for the Iranians in real time to know who the attacker was, and thus to make a public case for retaliating. It takes a long time to figure out where a cyber attack comes from.

That was a big reason for the U.S. and Israel to attack Natanz in this way. But it wasn’t the only reason, at least from the American perspective. One of the main driving forces for Olympic Games was to so wrap the Israelis into a project that could cripple Natanz in a subtle way that Israel would see less of a motivation to go about a traditional bombing, one that could plunge the Middle East into a another war. [my emphasis]

A key purpose of StuxNet, according to Sanger, was not just to set back the Iranian nuke program. Rather, it was to set back the nuke program in such a way as to set back Israel’s push for war against Iran.

With that in mind, consider the way the article blamed the Israelis for letting StuxNet escape.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

After having explained that the whole point of StuxNet was to stop the Israelis from bombing Iran, the article then goes on to say that what alerted the Iranians to StuxNet’s presence in their systems–and effectively gave a very dangerous weapon to hackers around the world–was an Israeli modification to the code.

The Israelis went too far.

Those details are, IMO, some of the most interesting new details, not included the last time David Sanger confirmed the US and Israel were behind StuxNet on the front page of the NYT.

How very telling, then, that of all the highly revealing articles that have come out during this Administration–of all of the highly revealing articles that have come out in general, including Sanger’s earlier one revealing some of the very same details–Congress is going apeshit over this one.

Continue reading →


UndieBomb 2.0: Defying the Trend

By:  Wednesday June 6, 2012 2:00 pm

In his story describing the lowered standards for drone strikes the other day, Greg Miller described multiple officials admitting that we’re increasing the number of drone strikes in Yemen even though there’s no evidence more people are “migrat[ing]” to join AQAP.

U.S. officials said the pace has accelerated [in the last five months] even though there has not been a proliferation in the number of plots, or evidence of a significantly expanded migration of militants to join AQAP.

That may conflict with John Brennan’s claims that AQAP has tripled in size since the UndieBomber 1.0. It may suggest that that growth all took place before the last year. Or it may suggest–particularly given the use of the word “migration”–that these officials are distinguishing between non-Yemenis and local insurgents allying with AQAP.

Whichever it is, the NCTC just reported, last year attacks from AQAP didn’t go up either–in fact, they went down slightly.

Attacks by AQ and its affiliates increased by 8 percent from 2010 to 2011. A significant increase in attacks by al-Shabaab, from 401 in 2010 to 544 in 2011, offset a sharp decline in attacks by al-Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI) and a smaller decline in attacks by al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qa‘ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Everyone but John Brennan–who has a history of lying about drone strikes–seems to be saying that the risk from terrorism, while still real, is going down in Yemen, not up.

UndieBomb Plot 2.0, to the limited degree that it was a general plan of Ibrahim al-Asiri and not a plot from Mohammed bin Nayef, appears to defy the trend.

Which brings me to something that’s been gnawing at me about the public claims about UndieBomb 2.0.

Imagine you’re Ibrahim al-Asiri. A Saudi-Brit shows up, trains, impresses the trainers. He offers to do a suicide mission and–while you don’t meet with him personally–the trainers decide to send him off on UndieBomb Plot 2.0. He leaves and you wait, and wait, and wait. And … nothing. That is, according to all the people complaining that the AP reported the government had thwarted a plot, what the government had intended.

If you’re AQAP, wouldn’t it be more suspicious hearing nothing about the guy who just walked off with your UndieBomb than hearing John Brennan boasting that he had thwarted the UndieBomb. Not bragging that the Saudis had infiltrated AQAP, which is what Brennan ended up bragging about. Just a big dog-and-pony about thwarting an attack, as the Administration did when it intercepted the toner cartridge plot.

Probably, the AP’s version of the story is correct and the Administration planned a dog-and-pony show, which would have left Asiri with the impression that the Saudi-Brit was what he appeared to be, an aspiring suicide bomber that got caught.

One alternative is that UndieBomber 2.0 actually absconded with an UndieBomb, but intended to go back into AQAP and continue to collect information. I wonder, though: Giving the increasing number of targets in Yemen, you’d think it’d be at least as important to collect information about AQAP plans in Yemen as to obtain the latest UndieBomb in the guise of an attack on the US.

But I’m puzzled by the claim that the Administration wasn’t going to announce they had thwarted the plot. That doesn’t make sense.


The Banksters and the Cartels

By:  Wednesday June 6, 2012 12:00 pm

Two Colombian economists decided to see who’s getting money off the illegal drug trade. And they discovered that American and British banks are getting a big chunk of the profits. (h/t Chris from Americablog) That’s because the cartels are laundering their proceeds through those banks.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

Mind you, I’m not sure the analysis would be that different for any agricultural export. Even for food, farmers make less than 12% of all the money spent.

But one of the factors, the economists contend, is that the US more stringently polices money laundering in Colombian banks than in US ones.

Colombia’s banks, meanwhile, said Mejía, “are subject to rigorous control, to stop laundering of profits that may return to our country. Just to bank $2,000 involves a huge amount of paperwork – and much of this is overseen by Americans.”

“In Colombia,” said Gaviria, “they ask questions of banks they’d never ask in the US. If they did, it would be against the laws of banking privacy. In the US you have very strong laws on bank secrecy, in Colombia not – though the proportion of laundered money is the other way round. It’s kind of hypocrisy, right?”

I have noted (as does the Guardian), how banks like Wachovia used drug proceeds to help offset their losses from the mortgage bubble shitpile. I have noted how much less stringent we were in rooting out all the crime than we are with other banks, such as the Lebanese Canadian Bank. And I noted Citi’s recent wrist slap for allowing money laundering in the same shitpile period.

This article shows the other side to that: while our banksters get rich off of crime here, Colombia and Mexico and Honduras suffer the violence that results. That really has to change.