Magpie

Saturday, July 8, 2006

Don't worry about terrorists flooding the Holland Tunnel any time soon.

Yesterday, I expressed a wee bit of skepticism about whether the alleged plot to attack the Holland Tunnel and other transportation infrastructure in the northeast US ever posed a real danger. Today, some intelligence sources say that the tunnel plot was nothing but terrorist 'chatter.' Instead of being a serious threat, say the sources, the plot was just big talk by 'unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training' — and the US government was probably aware of the plotters almost from the beginning.

"The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site," said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved — three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere — are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

"They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him."

[Two CIA officers] with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred — and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain.

Given the turf war between the CIA and FBI over who calls the shots in the 'war on terror,' my guess is that interagency politics was almost as big a reason for releasing the story about the 'plot' as was Dubya's low poll numbers.

Via Raw Story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:15 AM | Get permalink

Friday, July 7, 2006

Here's a nasty consequence of stretching the US military too thin.

It's a well-established fact that Dubya's administration invaded Iraq with far too few troops to control the country effectively — a fact that's re-emphasized daily by the virulence of the Iraqi insurgency and the rising numbers of dead and injured US troops. As the war becomes more unpopular with the public, the military has found it increasingly difficult to meet its need for personnel, and has had to lower educational and other standards in order to meet recruitment requirements.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the military has lowered the recruitment bar in an area that will have long-term and nasty consequences here at home: Racist extremists are once again serving in the military in large numbers.

From the SPLC's full report:

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

From the SPLC press release:

Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces.

Department of Defense investigators estimate thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity....

Military extremists present an elevated threat both to their fellow soldiers and the general public. Today's white supremacists become tomorrow's domestic terrorists.

"Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics and explosives," said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project.

"We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution. Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh."

Becuase of the danger posed by racist extremists, the SPLC is urging the Defense Department to adopt 'a zero-tolerance policy regarding racist extremism among members of the U.S. military.'

I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for this policy change if I were the SPLC. After all, we're talking about right-wing terrorists here. If there was a danger that left-wingers were learning the skills needed to become terrorists, it would be a different matter, I'm certain.

You can read the SPLC's complete report on racist extremists in the military if you go here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:06 AM | Get permalink

Another day, another terror plot.

I see from reading today's NY Times that the plot du jure is an alleged scheme to bomb the transportation system in New York and New Jersey, including the Holland Tunnel. This, of course, comes only a few weeks after the feds arrested the Keystone Cops plotters in Florida, who were supposedly going to bomb the Sears Tower.

It's obvious that these 'plots' have more to do with the GOP strategy for turning back Democratic hopes to gain control of one or both houses of Congress in the Fall elections than they do with any real threats. You can bet that we're going to see a bunch more of them 'exposed' between now and November 6.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:31 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, July 5, 2006

Imagine that it's the year 2000.

The US presidential election has just ended. The votes are being counted, and no one is sure whether Gore or Bush is the next president.

Then imagine that, as the last votes are being counted in from Florida, 3.5 million new uncounted votes turn up from all over the country.

That's pretty much the situation now in Mexico, where both leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and right-winger Felipe Calderon declared victory on the basis of the preliminary results from Sunday's election. While that first count showed Calderon with a lead of about one percent of the vote, a mandatory recount starts later today. And, as it turns out, that recount will include as many as 3.5 million votes that weren't counted the first time through.

PRD supporters shout 'No Fraud!' in a demonstration in Mexico City.
The sign reads 'Lopez Obrador already is the legal president.'
[Photo: Luis Acosta/AFP]

Hinting at insider corruption and citing a series of voting "irregularities," advisers to leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are demanding a manual recount of every single vote and did not rule out street protests to ratchet up pressure on federal election authorities.

"You cannot come to a final outcome if you do not count all the votes," said Manuel Camacho Solis, a top Lopez Obrador aide. "We are going to demand that the votes are counted ... We have the right to go to the streets and we have the right to express our opinion with full freedom...."

Calderon's ruling National Action Party, or PAN, dismissed the allegations of irregularities, portraying Lopez Obrador as a sore loser.

The standoff has left Mexico the equivalent of one hanging chad away from a Latin American version of the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election &3151; only with a greater potential for unrest among the country's poor masses, who already are receptive to the idea of fraudulent elections.

There's good reason for those suspicions. It's generally believed that opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas would have been the victor in the 1988 presidential elections had the then-ruling PRI party not engaged in massive election fraud. Exit polls and early results showed Cárdenas with a subtantial lead over PRI candidate Carlos Salinas. Late in the evening, the government computers went down mysteriously and — surprise! — Salinas was winning when the computers came back up.

Supporters of Lopez Obrador and other observers say that even though the PRI is out of power, the current ruling party may have used some tricks from the PRI's old election playbook:

Even if the 3.5 million votes don't swing the election, the PRD says it has other "inconsistencies" that prove the results are flawed, including double voting in a Calderon stronghold. They also say that hundreds of vote tallies show markings in congressional races but inexplicably no preference in the presidential contest.

A McClatchy photographer working in the troubled southern state of Oaxaca witnessed discrepancies between the vote tallies posted outside voting stations in the town of Tlalcolula and the data appearing on the IFE's Web site. The photographer also found examples of the presidential vote not counted.

PRD officials are also hinting that Calderon may have a conflict of interest in the election agency itself, saying that could explain why computerized returns showed both candidates actually shedding votes in the wee hours of election night.

Namely, Camacho, the Lopez Obrador adviser, said the campaign was looking into allegations that Calderon's brother-in-law had been involved in the creation of vote-tallying software used by the IFE.

"We are investigating this," he said.

As in the 2000 US election, it appears that Mexicans won't know who their next president will be for weeks, and it's not clear what role the 3.5 million uncounted ballots will have in that decision. Many of them will be invalid, and the valid votes will have to skew heavily toward Lopez Obrador in order to reverse Calderon's apparent narrow win. Given the history of Mexican elections, however, almost any result is possible.

The McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) Washington Bureau has an excellent article on the election controversy here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Have a star-spangled 4th of July.

And as you're celebrating the nation's 230th birthday, don't forget those workers whose hard labor has been supporting the robust US economy we all enjoy under Dubya's beneficent rule.

Chinese women sewing US flags

[Illustration: Christoph Niemann]

You can view a larger version of the cover here.

I know that I've seen the Chinese propaganda poster where Christoph Niemann found the image of the woman that he borrowed for his New Yorker cover, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere on the web. If you can point me to the original, I'd be much obliged.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:43 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, July 2, 2006

New Orleans: Still devastated. Still forgotten.

Author Susan Straight just returned from a the annual meeting of the American Library Association, which was held this year in New Orleans. Straight has et down some of her impressions of what the city is like almost a year post-Katrina in a short piece for Salon. I doubt I have to tell you what she found there.

Ninth Ward, New Orleans

A flood-damaged house in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, photographed on Saturday. Note the military Humvee on patrol in the background.
[Photo: Sean Gardner/Reuters]

On my last day, the young waitress who had befriended me during breakfasts approached me hesitantly. She said, "Are you with the librarians?" I told her I was a writer. "Oh," she said, sounding disappointed. "My sister told me the librarians might be giving out books."

The way she said the word -- books -- was as if they were gold. "My daughter loves to read," she said softly. "But we don't have any books."

Tonia was from the Ninth Ward, and evacuated with her mother and daughter the day of Katrina. She was eight months pregnant, ended up in Dauphin Island, Ala., until last month, when she returned with her children to live in her mother's house in the Central Business District. She'd lost everything, and will never return to the Ninth Ward. But she's working at a hotel, as is her sister, and her daughter still loves words.

Only two of the city's 12 libraries are reopened. Most are listed as "devastated," and this week, hundreds of ALA volunteers are cleaning libraries and trying to restock. But it will take months, and if no one rebuilds in Cameron Parish, or in the Ninth Ward, whose children will read our books?

Of course, the fact that the Gulf Coast is still devastated almost a year after being hit by hurricanes Katrina and Rita has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the bulk of the people in the disaster area are poor and/or black.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:16 AM | Get permalink

How do you spell 'Iran'?

The answer increasingly looks like this: I-R-A-Q.

In the current New Yorker, investigative reporter Sy Hersh looks at how the US military is trying to derail the Dubya administration's race toward military action against Iran.

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President's plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

A crucial issue in the military's dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. "The target array in Iran is huge, but it?s amorphous," a high-ranking general told me. "The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?" The high-ranking general added that the military's experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. "We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq," he said.

?There is a war about the war going on inside the building,? a Pentagon consultant said. ?If we go, we have to find something.? [Emphasis mine]

Hersh's piece looks at the military reasons why an attack on Iran will fail, and at the likely political consequences of such an attack. It's not a pretty picture.

It'a another must-read in a series of must-reads from Hersh. Check it out here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:02 AM | Get permalink

When should the press let the government's secrets out of the bag?

For the last week, the NY Times and, to some degree, the LA Times have been getting slagged by Dubya's administration and the right-wing echo chamber for revealing another secret government program: The monitoring of world-wide banking and financial transactions under the guise of preventing terrorism. Both papers have been accused of threatening national security by writing about the supposedly secret program, despite the fact that the financial monitoring has been an open secret for years. In fact, both the administraton and its supporters in the press have alluded frequently to the program since 9/11, which certainly leads this magpie to question the motivation for the current firestorm of anti-press criticism.

In an op-ed appearing Saturday, the editors of both the LA Times and NY Times respond to their critics, and discuss how and why their papers decide to publish — or not publish — stories about stuff that the government would prefer to keep under wraps. Overall, it's a good defense of both papers' actions. However, I have to note that the op-ed glosses over the fact that the NY Times sat on a story about NSA monitoring of phone and internet communications for over a year. Given that the Times was reportedly aware of that monitoring before the 2004 presidential elections, I'd really like to see the paper's editor come clean as to why they didn't print it.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:43 AM | Get permalink