So Not a Surprise. The CIA F%$#ed Up, and then Covered it Up

In Newsweek, of all places, we have Jeff Stein explaining part of why the CIA is trying to suppress and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Rather unsurprising, torturer and tape destroyer Jose Rodriguez figures prominently in all of this:

The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he'd narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

"I guess I would've done it," he said, implying you either took orders or quit. But everybody in the counterterrorism program knew what was going on in those places, he said, and he was glad the agency found something else for him to do at the last minute. "Look what's happened."

Four years after Feinstein launched her probe of that interrogation program, her committee and the CIA are locked in a death-struggle over what can be released from the panel's 6,300-page, still-classified report. The impasse is bringing renewed attention to statements by former CIA and FBI agents that buttress the committee's all-but-official conclusion that the agency exaggerated the interrogation program's successes and minimized its abuses.

In early 2008, for example, the committee heard from Ali Soufan, one of the FBI's top former counterterrorism agents, who has since gone public with his criticism of the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, that CIA contractors had used on top Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah. "The staffers present were shocked," he wrote in his memoir, The Black Banners. "What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, 'Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.' "

A Lebanese-American who was decorated by both the FBI and Defense Department for his counterterrorism work, Soufan laid out a case for the committee that CIA officials, chiefly Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA counterterrorism boss who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, lied about the value of torturing detainees-to the point of altering the dates on documents to show a cause-and-effect that didn't exist.

"In this area, it's not a question of memory but of factual record," he later told the New Yorker's Amy Davidson. "There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the EITs claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claim.

This is why the CIA is terrified.

They are not afraid that their immorality will be revealed, they are afraid that their incompetence and mendacity will be revealed.

They are afraid that meaningful oversight will reveal that there are no adults in the room, which will lead to ……… meaningful oversight.

Damn………

The 2^nd member of the Arisia founding "Gang of Five", Mary Robison, just died.

It was at her New Years Day party where I made the joke that started the con.

I did not mean it seriously, honest. It was a John Swift-like (I wish) essay called, "A Modest Proposal on NESFA and Boskone."

I never expected anyone to take it seriously.

Tom Fish died last year, so it's just Chris Shuldiner, Brian Cooper, and me who are left.

I always figured that I would go first, even though I was the youngest (by only a LITTLE).

BTW, I just realized that the essay is not visible on "The Google", so I am posting it here, where it will be indexed. (After the break)

I printed it out on a dot matrix printer, and seeing as how I do not have a dot matrix font on my blog, it is in Courier.

If you don't get the context, which dates back to 1988 fandom bullsh%$ or so, count yourself lucky, and do not Google it.

Out Like a Lamb, My Ass!

They are predicting snow tomorrow.

Seriously.  It's the Spring, and it's f%$3ing Baltimore!!!

WWUS41 KLWX 250030
WSWLWX
URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
830 PM EDT MON MAR 24 2014

DCZ001-MDZ004>007-009>011-013-014-016-VAZ030-031-040-042-050>056-
501-502-WVZ053-250830-
/O.NEW.KLWX.WW.Y.0020.140325T1000Z-140325T1900Z/
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA-FREDERICK MD-CARROLL-NORTHERN BALTIMORE-
HARFORD-MONTGOMERY-HOWARD-SOUTHERN BALTIMORE-PRINCE GEORGES-
ANNE ARUNDEL-CHARLES-WARREN-CLARKE-RAPPAHANNOCK-LOUDOUN-ORANGE-
CULPEPER-PRINCE WILLIAM/MANASSAS/MANASSAS PARK-FAIRFAX-
ARLINGTON/FALLS CHURCH/ALEXANDRIA-STAFFORD-SPOTSYLVANIA-
NORTHERN FAUQUIER-SOUTHERN FAUQUIER-JEFFERSON-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...WASHINGTON...FREDERICK...WESTMINSTER...
GAITHERSBURG...COLUMBIA...BALTIMORE...ANNAPOLIS...WALDORF...
FRONT ROYAL...LEESBURG...CULPEPER...MANASSAS...MANASSAS PARK...
FAIRFAX...ALEXANDRIA...FALLS CHURCH...FREDERICKSBURG...
WARRENTON...CHARLES TOWN
830 PM EDT MON MAR 24 2014

WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM TO 3 PM EDT
TUESDAY
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON HAS
ISSUED A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW... WHICH IS IN EFFECT
FROM 6 AM TO 3 PM EDT TUESDAY.
* PRECIPITATION TYPE...SNOW.
* ACCUMULATIONS...1 TO 3 INCHES. THE HIGHEST AMOUNTS WILL BE NORTH
AND WEST OF INTERSTATE 95 TOWARD THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS.
* TIMING...SNOW WILL BEGIN EARLY TUESDAY MORNING. THE HEAVIEST
SNOW IS EXPECTED TUESDAY MORNING BEFORE TAPERING OFF DURING THE
AFTERNOON AND EARLY EVENING.
* TEMPERATURES...LOW TEMPERATURES TONIGHT IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S.
HIGH TEMPERATURES TUESDAY WILL BE IN THE MID TO UPPER 30S.
* WINDS...BECOMING SOUTHEAST AROUND 5 MPH.
* IMPACTS...ROADS WILL BE SNOW COVERED AND SLIPPERY TUESDAY
MORNING AND TRAVEL WILL BE DIFFICULT DURING THE MORNING COMMUTE.
MOST SURFACES WILL BECOME WET TUESDAY AFTERNOON WITH
TEMPERATURES RISING ABOVE FREEZING.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW WILL CAUSE
TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SLIPPERY ROADS AND LIMITED
VISIBILITIES...AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.
&&

This is completely whack!

Ear Worm is not Necessarily a Pejorative

I woke up this morning, and had a song that I could not get out of my head.

Thankfully, it was IMNSHO, the best song from The Who album Face Dances, Tricky Day.

Have a Youtube link, because my so does not support embeds.

Enjoy.

Posted via mobile.

I Did Not Know This

I was aware that the Chinese had developed the JF-17 for Pakistan, and that it was dirt cheap, but I did no know that it is technically a MiG-21 derivative:

In 1989, the Chinese Chengdu Aerospace Corporation unveiled a major upgrade for its locally-made F-7 jet fighter, a licensed copy of the classic Soviet MiG-21. The new F-7 variant moved the engine air intake from the nose tip to the sides of the fuselage, making room in the nose for a more powerful radar.

Twenty-one years later, this upgrade—now named JF-17 Thunder—is flying combat missions with the Pakistani air force, so far its sole user. Further enhanced with a new wing, a cutting-edge intake design and a new, more powerful engine, the JF-17 is Pakistan’s most important front-line fighter—and a remarkable extension of a basic plane design dating back to the 1950s.

In essence, the JF-17 is the ultimate MiG-21. In a sector increasingly dominated by American-made stealth fighters, European “canard” planes and variants of the Russian Su-27, the JF-17 is an outlier—a highly evolutionary plane that doesn’t try to be revolutionary.

(emphasis original)

The report is that the agility is similar to that of early model F-16s, which is to say better than that of later, heavier, models.

I'm not sure how much of the original MiG-21 remains.  The fuselage immediately behind the cockpit looks vague similar, as does the landing gear arrangement, but the wing, horizontal tail, and vertical tail are completely different.

At $25 million a pop, it's dirt cheap, and the new engine should improve range, though considering  the limited range of the MiG 21, this is not a high bar to clear.

It's a lot smaller than most of the other fighters currently in production.  It's the size of the Gripen, and smaller than the successor Gripen E/F, though both of those aircraft have significantly greater payload and range.

If I were a budget despot, it would be on my list.

I Guess It's Just a Recovery Weekend

I think that I am FINALLY getting over this damn cold.

Posted via mobile.

Just Read The Onion's Obituary Is the Definitive One

Fred Phelps is dead, or as The Onion says, "Fred Phelps, Man Who Forever Stopped March Of Gay Rights, Dead At 84."

You have finally made the world a better place Mr. Phelps, by leaving it.

The First Law of Holes is………

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. (This is generally attributed to British politician Denis Healey)

Well two weeks after Randa Jarrar wrote a bigoted screed on non-Arabs belly dancing, and was pilloried for this, (I called her a bigoted moron) she writes a followup where she doubles down on her repellent thesis.

Rather uncharitably, my first reaction was a bit of smug self-satisfaction when she appeared to specifically mention my blog, "Other men on racist blogs called me a moron."


Needless to say, I stand by my analysis of her earlier post, and her most recent article further reinforces the truth behind the Denis Healey quote.

The interesting thing is that from an aesthetic perspective we generally agree on the aesthetics of Middle Eastern dance, we both agree that the westernized cartoonized version of Middle Eastern dance, what I call "Cabaret", is crap. (Of course, 90% of everything is crap [Sturgeon's law])

Further we would agree that many, probably most, of the public performances of Middle Eastern dance in the west are crap.

I would go a bit further, and note that the same applies to public performances in Egypt, Turkey, Lebanaon, Syria, etc.

But there is a difference between objecting to the Disneyfication of an art form and saying that some ethnic group should not be allowed to practice that art.



Furthermore in she goes there, and explicitly states that, "It's not possible," for her to be a racist, one would assume because she is an Arab.

Bigotry much?


Finally, one of the commenters on this thread posted a Scribd document describing the history of Middle Eastern dance.  It' is worth a read.

I've attached it after the break.

I'm Back………

Basically 24 hours flat on my back being sick.

This is the first sick day that I have taken since………longer than I can remember.

No Blogging Tonight

I have a cold and a fever, and not in a cool Peggy Lee kind of way.

Posted via mobile.

Deep Thought

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.

— John Maynard Keynes
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930)

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Koch Suckers at the Cato Institute Just Came Out Against Investor-State Dispute Settlements

Yes, Cato has come out against the the ISDS, that secret court that allows private entities to sue countries under arbitrary rules slanted in favor of investors.

This is kind of like Ford recommending General Motors pickup trucks for consumers:

Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition to a landmark EU-US trade agreement, a growing number of backers of the deal are starting to ask a simple question: might the future of transatlantic trade be better served if one of its most controversial provisions was simply dropped?

Almost nine months after negotiations opened with great hope and fanfare, opponents of the mooted Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, are rallying against a plan that would allow private investors to use the pact to sue governments if they felt local laws threatened their investment.
Environmentalists worry that it would allow big US oil companies to challenge France’s anti-fracking laws and other environmental regulations, while consumer groups fret that it would open the EU’s sacrosanct ban on genetically modified organisms to a challenge from American agribusiness.

The concerns in Europe over the inclusion of an “investor-state dispute settlement”, or ISDS, mechanism grew so loud earlier this year that Karel De Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, announced he would suspend negotiations on the relevant text to hold public consultations.

But in recent weeks, as both sides have been preparing for Monday’s resumption of negotiations in Brussels, the opposition has spread beyond the traditional sceptics.

In a paper released last week, Daniel Ikenson, director of the trade programme at the conservative Cato Institute, argued that the investor protection measure had become too toxic. And that in order to defuse the growing opposition, negotiators should simply drop what seemed like a superfluous provision.

“ISDS is not even essential to the task of freeing trade. So why burden the effort by carrying needless baggage?” Mr Ikenson wrote in his paper, which called for the US to drop ISDS provisions from its push for a 12-country Pacific Rim deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well.

Cato, and the Kochs, are all about enforcing the primacy of the holders of capital over that of democratically elected government, so this turn around is a big deal, and it's a good thing.

In an era of historically low tariffs, these increasingly anti-sovereignty provisions in trade deals are being viewed with well justified suspicion.

The old argument, "Because ……… Free Trade," is simply no longer enough to justify trade deals with draconian IP and investor protections.

It's a welcome side effect of the financial meltdown.

Oh Crap

Russia has annexed the Crimea.

This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

There is a lot of blame to allocate:

• Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
• Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
• Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
• Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
• The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn't any of them.

That was us.  That was neocon Victoria "F%$# the EU" Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson's (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

Where are the "Adults in the Room" who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to "stupid wars", and so should be keeping these people's hands away from the reigns of power.

The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

And I Would have Gotten Away With it Too, if it Weren't for You Meddling Voters

The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions:

The newest bit of “wisdom” for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have “a stable governance” and that’s why “they constantly get better every year.”

Here’s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com (and you can watch the video below):

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do…So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

Actually, all charter schools don’t have stable governance and all of them aren’t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.

Note that Hastings has invested millions in Rocketship charger schools, and while they claim to to be a not for profit, stoprocketship.com does provide numerous links that seem to indicate that much of their activities are structured so as to provide profits for its principals and those who make contributions.

No wonder Reed Hastings thinks that voters are annoying.  It makes the grifting too hard.

Note that this is not limited to education, where charter schools do not (when comparing apples to apples) outperform the public school system, and where in the extreme case (New Orleans 90% charters) we are seeing increasing cases of malfeasance and misfeasance requiring greater oversight.

It also applies to things like trade deals, or the Simpson-Bowles commission.

Even if this actually resulted in good policy, it would be wrong, but when you look at things like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, etc., it is clear that all it does is that it creates an orgy of corruption and rent seeking.

When you decide to take democracy out of the mix, and run this stuff "like a business", someone gets the profit, and ain't the taxpayer.

Rupert Murdoch is Insane

I am not referring to Murdoch's recent meltdown over the sponsors dropping the St. Patrick's day parade for their gay ban. (The fact that the quintessential Irish brewer, Guinness, has dropped the parade amuses me.)

Rather I am referring to the fact that Matt Groening has revealed that Murdoch was considering suing the producers of The Simpsons over their parody of a Fox News crawl:

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker, the show's creator Matt Groening has claimed.

Mr Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda.

The alleged row centred on a parody of Fox News' rolling news ticker, which included headlines such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?"

Mr Groening said the news channel backed down because it would have caused Fox to bring a lawsuit against itself.

"Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it," Mr Groening told National Public Radio in the US.

"But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he added on NPR's Fresh Air programme.

I am so reassured that a media magnate billionaire who is one white Persian cat away from being a Bond villain is wasting his time on this sh%$.

Thank You Victoria Nuland

Thanks to neocon support right-wing nationalists Ukraine, courtesy of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Ur-neocon Robert Kagan's wife, a deal got killed, and there was coup in the Ukraine, followed by anti-ethnic Russian legislation, which was in turn followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimea.

Well, now we have an overwhelming vote for the Crimea to join Russia:

Russian state media said Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia on Sunday, as Kiev accused Moscow of pouring forces into the peninsula and warned separatist leaders "the ground will burn under their feet".

With over half the votes counted, 95.5 percent had chosen the option of annexation by Moscow, the head of the referendum commission, Mikhail Malyshev, said two hours after polls closed. Turnout was 83 percent, he added - a high figure given that many who opposed the move had said they would boycott the vote.

Western powers and leaders in Kiev denounced it as a sham.

Underlining how Moscow's military takeover of the peninsula two weeks ago has driven Russia and the West into a crisis with echoes of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama spoke by telephone and, according to the Kremlin, the Russian and U.S. presidents agreed on a need to cooperate to stabilize Ukraine.

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and Victoria "F%$# the EU" Nuland, and those who have decided to employ her in (Obama, Clinton, Kerry) need to realize that neocon triumphulism has been a recipe for a US foreign policy disaster.

I'm not saying that neocons should not be employed by the State Department, but I am saying that they should not be put in positions of authority.

Witness how we are now repeating the South Ossetia debacle all over again.

It's like giving an AK-47 to a hyperactive 6-year old child.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)

Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. [As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

Krugman makes a point that needs to be made.  Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater's Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.

So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, "mindful human beings," to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.

And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net:

In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

………

On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

Ouch.

I Don't Know Sh%$ About This

I am referring, of course, to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

I do not know what happened. I cannot separate the wheat from the chaff from the various reports.

So, unlike many blogs, as well as Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, I'm going to keep my f%$#ing mouth shut, as opposed to speculating on what happened.

Once there is a report, I may have some thoughts, but right now I admit that I am without a clue on this.

If the Gripen Were in the US Inventory, It Would Be a World Beater

We are getting some new details on the updated Saab Gripen, and its a good example of what happens when you take procurement away from the generals, and give it to procurement professionals like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV): (paid subscription required)

Saab, its Swedish air force customer and Selex-ES have disclosed new details of the JAS 39E Gripen fighter, which has been in full development for just over a year following a six-year risk-reduction and demonstration effort. The JAS 39E is a new aircraft in detail, with only a few structural or systems components in common with the current JAS 39C/D, but it shares enough with its predecessor to take full advantage of weapon-integration experience and uses an evolved version of the C/D's software.

Compared with earlier Gripen variants, the JAS 39E has a higher gross weight and can carry 2,400 lb. more internal fuel, mostly due to a redesigned main landing gear that retracts into underwing bulges rather than the body. The nose gear has also been changed, from a twin-wheel unit to a larger single wheel that is compatible with emergency arrester cables on runways. The main structure has been redesigned with continuous wing-fuselage frames that extend to the inboard wing pylons, where the outer wings are attached, and the fuselage contours have been changed, partly to accommodate more fuel. However, the redesign has reduced the airframe's proportion of the empty weight, boosting useful load.

The JAS 39E will be able to engage stealth targets with a fused, multispectral sensor suite (see article below), according to program officials. It will be able to cruise at Mach 1.25 without using afterburner, and will enter service in 2018 with a full suite of weapons including the MBDA Meteor ramjet-powered air-to-air missile (which enters service next year on the JAS 39C/D). The Swedish air force's fixed-price contract for 60 complete aircraft, converted from JAS 39Cs but with new engine, avionics and primary structure, equates to a flyaway price of $43 million.

The JAS 39E is not a classically stealthy aircraft, but the development contract stipulates a significantly lower radar cross-section (RCS) than the JAS 39C. In conjunction with the all-new Saab-developed electronic warfare system, which uses gallium nitride antenna technology and is described as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensor in its own right, and the new Selex-ES Brite Cloud expendable active decoy, the reduced RCS is expected to allow the fighter to survive against advanced threats, including the Sukhoi T-50 fighter and “double-digit” surface-to-air missiles, while avoiding the cost and risk of an F-35-type stealth configuration.

The first customers, Sweden and Switzerland, are buying only single-seat aircraft, but codevelopment of the two-seat JAS 39F is being discussed with Brazil, which selected the new Gripen to reequip its fighter force in December.

The JAS 39E is intended to have a lower acquisition cost than the JAS 39C, despite its greater capability, and to have a lower operating cost than any other fighter. The Swedish air force reports an hourly operating cost of $7,500 for the JAS 39C, including fuel. For development costs (also covered by a fixed-price contract), Saab's goal is to spend only 60% as much as it would have cost using the same tools and processes that were used on the JAS 39C.

………

Gripen Upgrade

	JAS 39C	JAS 39E
Empty weight, lb.	13,000	less than 14,000
Internal fuel, lb.	greater than 5,000	greater than7,400
Max takeoff weight, lb.	30,900	36,400
Engine	Volvo RM12	GE F414-GE-39E
Intermediate/Max thrust, lb.	12,150/18,100	14,400/22,000
Supercruise	No	Mach 1.25
Radar	Mechanical scan	AESA
IRST	No	Yes
Cockpit display	3—6 X 8 in.	1—8 X 20 in.

Interestingly, they accomplish this with a remarkably small amount of commonality with the prior models.

For the upgrade that they offer from the "C" to the "E", they will, "retain almost none of the previous airframe, but will reuse parts of its fuel and air systems, plus its ejection seat, windshield, canopy and outer wing elevons."

They will be producing a completely new aircraft, one that is more capable than its predecessor, with better avionics, more payload, more performance, more range, and lower purchase and operating costs.

What's more, it looks that through sensor fusion they may achieve some fairly impressive anti-stealth performance: (Paid subscription required)

New sensors being developed for the JAS 39E and close to starting flight tests on the JAS 39-7 Gripen Demo testbed will be able to detect low-radar-cross-section (RCS) targets, and will provide the pilots in a Gripen formation with a new level of situational awareness, according to Bob Mason, Selex-ES marketing director for advanced sensors.

The JAS 39E will have three Selex-ES sensors. The Raven ES-05 active, electronically scanned array radar (AESA), developed by the company's Edinburgh unit, will be the first production AESA to be mounted on a “repositioner,” a rotating mount that gives the radar a ±100-deg. field of view around the nose. The Skyward-G infrared search and track (IRST) system (from Nebbiano, Italy) is based on experience with the Eurofighter Typhoon's Pirate IRST and Selex-developed land- and sea-based IRSTs. The fighter also has a new identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system with three electronically steerable antenna arrays, which matches the radar's range and field of view.

The three main sensors will cue one another automatically to display to pilots a fused picture of airspace around the fighter; it will also be fused with the JAS's new electronic-warfare system. Finally, sensor data can be shared between Gripens in a flight via data link.

One of the interesting things is that they use "kinetic ranging" to get range on target through the IR sensors, where, "the aircraft performs a weaving maneuver and the range is determined by the change in azimuth angle to the target—or the IRSTs on two aircraft can triangulate the target over the TAU-Link." (The data network that Gripens share).

Notice how the Swedes, and Saab, have gone pretty much in the opposite direction that the US did on the F-22 and F-35:

• Segregated as opposed to integrated software.
• Keeping cost as a primary consideration as opposed to bleeding edge.
• Seeing the planes as integrated into an open battlefield network, as opposed to being data roach motels.  (Data goes in, but it doesn't come out)
• Using existing technology wherever possible. 

The progress of the Gripen is an example of how defense procurement can work, and how our defense procurement doesn't work.

I'm Not As Think As You Drunk

Happy Purim everyone.

Posted via mobile.

My Son Called this the Most Insensitive Joke That He's Ever Heard

It's not my joke.

It's the universe's joke.

It turns out that the777-200ER from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (9M-MRO), which has yet to be found is the four-hundred and fourth 777 produced by Boeing.

Yep, that's right, 404: Not Found.

I Add My First Canadian to my List of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off

This is truly EPIC ownage of Senator Richard Burr by Dr. Danielle Martin, vice president at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

While I understand that in some ways, this is shooting fish in a barrel, Burr is a clueless ignorant tool on pretty much everything he touches, but still, her exquisitely polite (She is Canadian, Eh?) response shows demolishes his delusional objections.

The nickel tour of the exchange, as rendered by rage comics: (Video follows) (Updated comic. I put in a draft my mistake)





H/t Salon.

The Cowardice and Hypocrisy of Some Haredim in One Sentence

That sentence was, 50 Thousand Haredim March So Only Other Jews Die in War.

It was written by Yori Yanover who used to work for the Jewish Press, a New York based publication that caters to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) community.

They canned him, and deleted the page, though it is still available in the Google cache.

This is similar to what goes on with the dole money allotted to Haredim so that they don't have to work.

They are using Torah to derive personal benefit, and this is forbidden in normative Judaism, as it is said in Pirkei Avot 4:6, "Do not make the Torah into a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, and don't use it as a spade with which to dig into them."

Basically it means two things:

• The study of Torah is not about self-aggrandizement or puffing up one's own ego.
• The study of Torah is not about deriving personal financial benefit. (Which also implies that draft dodging is out as well)

Those Haredim who are protesting are batting 0 for 2 on this.

H/t Mitch Gilbert (the first link) who has republished the article.

You can also find a copy at Failed Messiah.

H/t to my brother, aka "The Bear Who Swims," for cluing me into this story.

Liar

In a photo-op with Democratic members of Congress, Barack Obama was asked about the allegations that the CIA hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers and threaten the committee staff, Obama let loose with this one of the most blatant lies I've heard in a long time:

Since that time, we have worked with the Senate committee so that the report that they are putting forward is well-informed, and what I’ve said is that I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.

Seems innocuous, but as Kevin Drum observes, "Last I heard, the report was completed in 2012. The CIA responded last June. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for declassification of at least the report's executive summary every since."

Much like his statement that he welcomed the debate on spying on American citizens engendered by the Snowden leaks, this latest statement is a lie.

If Obama had any interest in releasing an unclassified version of the Senate report, it would be out now, but he does not want it released, because the details on torture in the report are allegedly even more grisly, and far less effective, than what has already been made public.

If these details come out will make it difficult for Obama to keep ignoring the moral and constitutional issues raised by the mindless and useless brutality that was done in our name.

That's inconvenient, so Barack Obama wants it to go away.

A portrait in cynicism and cowardice.

The Republicans Jump C. Megalodon

C. Megalodon^*

It appears with the implosion of Chris Christie over Bridgegate, Ted Cruz being loathed by every mainstream candidate in the nation, Jim DeMint being the architect of their disastrous government shutdown, Bobby Jindal being too creepy for words, Rick Perry being too stupid (too inarticulate, and ……… oops), Paul Ryan is too creepy, and Rand Paul being too ……… Rand Paul, the Republican Presidential bench is rather lacking for 2016.

It appears that the Republicans are casting about for a viable candidate, and Joe Scarborough's name has been mooted:

For the past several months, we've heard a lot about Joe Scarborough's blueprint for the Republican Party to get back on track.

The congressman-turned-pundit has been talking about that stuff for years, of course, but it reached a fever pitch last November with the release of his book, "The Right Path."

"The buzz among GOP insiders is that 'The Right Path' has the potential to galvanize conservatives in the way Barry Goldwater’s 'Conscience of a Conservative' did half a century ago — especially conservatives ready to return to the winning ways of Ronald Reagan, who is on the cover, shown striding down the White House colonnade," gushed Politico's buzz arbiter Mike Allen.

Scarborough talked to TPM about the book, casually suggesting that "Joe Scarborough's worldview" was in sync with "Ronald Reagan's worldview and Bill Buckley's worldview and Margaret Thatcher's worldview."

You knew where this was going.

Inevitably, Joe Scarborough's book tour was viewed as a springboard for Joe Scarborough's 2016 presidential campaign. A few months after the book's release, The Daily Caller's Alex Pappas reported that it's "widely believed" at MSNBC that Scarborough has presidential aspirations.

Two days after that story ran, Scarborough told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he "won't rule anything out."

I know that somehow or other the Republicans will find a nominee in 2016, but this is beginning to look like the life cycle of a drummer for Spın̈al Tap.

^*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Nothing is the Matter With Kansas

Thomas Frank in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas? he is flummoxed about why the so-called American heartland vote against their economic interests when they vote "God, Guns, and Gays" social issues.

Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, "Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 years."

He's right.  The  Democrat Party's record on economic for the middle class, and the poor is amazingly weak tea when compared to anyone but the Republicans:

There are two problems with the Democratic approach. First, it's too abstract to appeal to anyone. Second, it's not true anyway. Democrats simply don't consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They've done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don't do anything for labor. They're soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can't even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.

Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.

Democrats have been unwilling to do any more than nibble around the edges for years.

It's all about extracting large donations from rich people, which requires that you support policies that make them richer and richer, and this money is extracted from the rest of us.

Rule Number 1: Do Not Piss off Jon Stewart

Rule number 2:  Going on The Daily Show to show what you are really nice guy.

Jim Kramer of Mad Money's evisceration was, until last night, the reigning champion of this, but his take down last night of former judge Andrew Napolitano's ignorant and bigoted spew of Neo-Confederate talking points about Abraham Lincoln mad that look like a tea party.

I'll not show you an interview, I'll just show you the (I sh%$ you not) game show segment.

It is unbelievably brutal:



Funny, but unbelievably brutal.

No Virginia, Trade Deals Do Not Require Draconian IP Restrictions

Case in point, Canada and South Korea, who signed a free trade agreement without an all encompassing over-broad IP regime:

Canada and South Korea announced agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement earlier today. The focus is understandably on tariff issues, but the agreement also contains a full chapter on intellectual property (note that the governments have only released summaries of the agreement, not the full text, which is still being drafted). The IP chapter is significant for what it does not include. Unlike many other trade deals - particularly those involving the U.S., European Union, and Australia - the Canada-South Korea deal is content to leave domestic intellectual property rules largely untouched. The approach is to reaffirm the importance of intellectual property and ensure that both countries meet their international obligations, but not to use trade agreements as a backdoor mechanism to increase IP protections.
Yesterday I noted that Canada might be asked to increase the term of copyright protection given that South Korea had agreed to longer copyright terms in its recent agreements with the European Union, Australia, and the U.S. In fact, the U.S. agreement contains extensive additional side letters on Internet provider liability, enforcement, and online piracy.  The Canada - South Korea deal rejects that approach with copyright, trademark, patent, and enforcement rules that are all consistent with current Canadian law (plus the coming border measures provisions in Bill C-8). 
On copyright, the summary states the agreement:

• reflects Canada's regime as updated by the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, which brought Canada into compliance with the World Intellectual Property Organization's two Internet treaties;


• reiterates existing aspects of Canada's regime, including the protection of technological protection measures (technology designed to protect copyrighted material), protection of rights management information, and special measures against copyright infringers on the Internet (no change to Canada’s notice and notice regime, which defines the responsibility of Internet service providers in respect of copyrighted material on their networks).

The specific reference to notice-and-notice is important since it confirms no takedown requirements nor three-strikes rules. The specific measures against copyright infringers may be interpreted as Canada's enabler provision that targets websites that facilitate infringement. Moreover, the references to reflecting Canada's regime indicates that there is no copyright term extension or other substantive changes.

No copyright erxtensions.  No requirement that the other countries accept evergreening of drugs.

IP sanity.  What a concept.

H/t Slashdot.

Barack Obama, What's Your F%$#ing Problem?

OK, we now know that the CIA is accused of spying on and breaking into Congressional computers. We also know, thanks to Dan Froomkin, that John Brennan wrote a letter admitting that they hacked into the Senate staffers' computers:

Brennan, in his own remarks after Feinstein’s speech on Tuesday, vaguely ridiculed allegations of CIA “hacking” and said that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” But nothing he said actually disputed Feinstein’s version of events.

And as Michael Masnick reported for Techdirt, a January 27 letter to Feinstein that Brennan  sent out to CIA staff on Tuesday actually confirmed the search, though Brennan described it — and the need for it — in the context of concern about a security breach:

Because we were concerned that there may be a breach or vulnerability in the system for housing highly classified documents, CIA conducted a limited review to determine whether these files were located on the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] side of the CIA network and reviewed audit data to determine whether anyone had accessed the files, which would have been unauthorized.

And he said he wasn’t done. “Only completion of the security review will answer how SSCI staff came into possession of the documents,” he wrote, saying that he had only “temporarily” suspended further action until getting Feinstein’s consent.

The “breach” in question concerned the committee staff’s possession of an internal CIA review of the materials the agency had previously turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

What is Barack Obama's response?  Abuses by the CIA are someone else's problem:

Barack Obama sought to distance the White House from the fierce dispute between top senators and the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, claiming it would be inappropriate for his administration to become involved the clash over an investigation into the use of torture in post-9/11 interrogations.

In the president’s first remarks about the dispute since Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence accused the CIA of a cover-up and intimidation directed at her staff, Obama said it was not a matter for the White House to “wade into at this point”.

This is something that you don't "wade into at this point"?  Seriously?  How can this not be a matter that you need to "wade into at this point"?

You are the HMFIC.^*  Do your F%$#ing job, and take charge!

The chief counsel of the CIA's review of the Senate report is a subject of the investigation whose name is mentioned 1600 times.

This person also attempted to intimidate Senate staffers by filing a bogus criminal complaint.

And the head of the CIA, John Brennan is saying that everything is hunky-dory.

You are F%$#ing President of the F%$#ing United States of F%$#ing America.  How the F%$ is this not your F%$#ing job?

I don't care how F%$#ing awsome you F%$#ing think you F%$#ing are, your mere existence does not constitute the "Hope" or the "Change" that have figured so prominently in your messaging.

Why the f%$# did you run to be President if you somehow don't think that this this is not your f%$#ing job?

^*Head Mother F%$#er In Charge.

I Got One Explanation for this, and It Ain't Good for Port Authority Chairman David Samson

The US Attorney in New Jersey is investigating the collection of scandals involving the George Washing Bridge and misappropriation of Hurricane Sandy aid.

On Friday, something odd happened. The US Attorney for New York City issued a subpoena for Port Authority Chairman David Samson.

Technically, it might be in the New York US Attorney's jurisdiction, since there are issues about votes that Samson took where he refused to recuse himself from issues that benefited the legal clients  at his firm.

The votes took place in New York City, so there are issue of whose case this might be.

Well today, the subpoena was rescinded:

A subpoena issued by the federal prosecutor from Manhattan to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey seeking documents related to Chairman David Samson was rescinded this afternoon, a source with knowledge of the subpoena said.

Samson has been under intense scrutiny by investigators and the media for several votes he has taken on Port Authority actions that may have benefited clients of his law firm, Wolff & Samson.

The subpoena was initially sent to Samson on Friday by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

However, the subpoena was withdrawn, according to the source, because of an overlapping investigation by Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

I understand why the subpoena was issued, but it is not clear why it was pulled back in 1 business day.

I can only think of one reason why a jurisdictional dispute would be resolved so quickly, and that is that the NJ USA called the NY USA, and explained that Samson is a primary target of their investigation.

I really cannot see any other scenario which would engender such a quick reversal.

We Now Get the Chance to See How Much Corruption Barack Obama will Tolerate in the State Security Apparatus

We have know that the President tolerated it when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper blatantly and unashamedly lied to Congress, but this is a much bigger deal.

Dianne Feinstein^* just took to the floor of the Senate and accused the CIA of obstructing a senate investigation and attempting to intimidate the Senate Intelligence Committee Staff:

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, on Tuesday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of a catalogue of cover-ups, intimidation and smears aimed at investigators probing its role in an “un-American and brutal” programme of post-9/11 detention and interrogation.

In a bombshell statement on the floor of the US Senate, Feinstein, normally an administration loyalist, accused the CIA of potentially violating the US constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to obstruct her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the crisis as a “defining moment” for political oversight of the US intelligence service.

Her unprecedented public assault on the CIA represented an intensification of the row between the committee and the agency over a still-secret report on the torture of terrorist suspects after 9/11.

Feinstein, who said she was making her statement “reluctantly”, confirmed recent reports that CIA officials had been accused of monitoring computer networks used by Senate staff investigators. Going further than previously, she referred openly to recent attempts by the CIA to remove documents from the network detailing evidence of torture that would incriminate intelligence officers.

She also alleged that anonymous CIA officials were effectively conducting a smear campaign in the media to discredit and “intimidate” Senate staff by suggesting they had hacked into the agency’s computers to obtain a separate, critical internal report on the detention and interrogation programme.

While it is tempting to focus on the obvious irony of Feinstein's outrage in the face of her previous full throated support of intellligence excesses, as Edward Snowden does, this is a much bigger issue.

If what Feinstein alleges is true, and I am inclined to believe it because it is a statement against her normal interests, which is as a CIA fanboi, it lends credibility.

Going over her speech, here is what she presents:

• The Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that all relevant documents be turned over to them so that they might be able to investigate the CIA's torture program.
• The CIA balked, and so the committee and then CIA Director Leon Panetta negotiated an arrangement whereby the staff would access these documents at a CIA secured facility.  Here is the relevant quote:

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

• Unsurprisingly, the CIA provided the documents without any sort of index or any search facility, though one was later added at Senate requests
• It was this computer system that the CIA searched, in contravention of their agreement.
• The CIA also insisted on additional multiple level levels of review that were not a part of the agreement.
• When the staff found something relevant, they would save it to disk at the securely located computer, or print it out.
• The staff found that documents that they had flagged as important were disappearing.
• The CIA denied this, then blamed the IT staffers, and finally claimed that this was ordered by the White House, who denied this, and ordered the CIA to cooperate, "The matter was resolved with a renewed commitment from the White House Counsel, and the CIA, that there would be no further unauthorized access to the committee’s network or removal of access to CIA documents already provided to the committee."
• In 2010, the staff found a draft of the "Internal Panetta Review," an internal review that Panetta commissioned by on torture that demolished the official CIA response to the (as yet unreleased) Senate report.  It specifically contradicted the official report in a number of ways, most notably:
• The practices were far more brutal that officially revealed.
• There was no meaningful intelligence derived from torture
• Because of the importance of the document, it mirrored the Senate Committee conclusions, the staff printed it out for safe keeping, and placed it in the secure safe in the Senate Intelligence Committee Offices.  This was done in accordance with the document handling procedures agreed between the CIA and Intel Committee.
• The CIA then disappeared the Panetta report from the Senate staffers computers.
• The CIA has still refused to supply the Panetta Review to the Senate.
• On January 15, 2014, "CIA personnel had conducted a “search”—that was John Brennan’s word—of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications."
• Note that even if this does not qualify as obstructing a Congressional investigation (I think that it does), it is a violation of the law for the CIA to conduct surveillance in the US   If they needed to search the computers (assuming that Congressional immunity does not apply) they would have to go the the FBI. (Which they must have hated)
• The CIA has refused to provide additional details on the scope of the search, which, "May also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance."
• The CIA's Inspector General looked at the searches done by the CIA, and concluded that they needed to be investigated criminally, and made a referral to the DoJ.
• In response, the acting general counsel of the CIA made a criminal referral of the Senate staffers to the DOJ.

Here is the money quote:

I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of congressional staff—the same congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers—including the acting general counsel himself—provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.

(emphasis mine)

While Feinstein does not mention the counsel's name, it is public knowledge that the CIA's acting general counsel is Robert Eatinger, who among other things, Authorized the Destruction of the CIA Torture Tapes Against the Instructions of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence.

The White House response is a a statement of, "Great Confidence," in CIA director John Brennan.  So Obama wants to keep this guy.

As I have said before, the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I expect further stonewalling on the part of both the CIA and the Obama administration.

What should happen is that Eatinger should be placed on leave, and his security clearance should be suspended, but I imagine that he will continue to do damage to the Constitution of the United States, and then he will retire with a full pension.

^*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.

Full speech follows:

Why We Should Ban Antibiotics in Animal Feed

Here is something that I missed.

I knew that antibiotics served to make animals to gain weight faster, but it never occurred to me that antibiotic residues are making the American public fat as well.

It makes sense antibiotics make cows, chickens, and pigs gain weight faster, so why shouldn't it have the same effect on humans?

This is particularly significant with pigs, because as opportunistic omnivores, they are metabolically quite similar to us:

If you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.

As an aside here, we know that this produces cheaper meat, and thanks to the Danes experiences with their antibiotic ban over the past 15 years, we know about how much money it saves, and it is less than 10¢ a pound.

It is basically negligible.

But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.

………

In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.

I think that it's clear that the major issue here is sources of chronic antibiotic exposure, with meat and poultry being the primary contributors, though the article downplays this:

Of course, while farm animals often eat a significant dose of antibiotics in food, the situation is different for human beings. By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat. American kids are prescribed on average about one course of antibiotics every year, often for ear and chest infections. Could these intermittent high doses affect our metabolism?

This statement is at best an inaccurate generalization.

There are numerous reports about issues involving antibiotic residues in meat, and it is one of the reasons that the FDA is proposing tighter restrictions on antibiotic use on livestock.

Going after Induhviduals?* Be Still My Beating Heart!

Benjamin Lawskey, head of New York's Department of Financial Services is now saying that he will be looking at criminal filings against individuals:

Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s aggressive banking regulator who is campaigning to clean up Wall Street, is turning his sights on the individuals as well as the institutions who squeeze struggling homeowners or help banks violate US sanctions.

“Corporations are a legal fiction. You have to deter bad individual conduct within corporations,” said Mr Lawsky, superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, in an interview with the Financial Times. “People who did the conduct are going to be held accountable.”

Mr Lawsky’s name-and-shame strategy taps into a wave of popular discontent in the US and Europe over the fact that few individual bankers have been personally sanctioned for the bad decisions that led to the global financial crisis. Taxpayers have been forced to stump up hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue banks brought low by reckless behaviour.

Mr Lawsky, who has ruffled the feathers of other US regulators by jumping ahead of them to accuse Standard Chartered of breaking sanctions on Iran, has already begun to take a tougher approach to individual behaviour.

As part of Royal Bank of Scotland’s settlement in December over sanctions violations, the bank was asked to let go of four RBS employees, including the head of Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the global banking unit, and claw back the bonuses of eight other employees. Mr Lawsky’s office is now investigating the rapid growth of non-bank mortgage servicing companies Ocwen and Nationstar. He is also looking into possible sanctions violations by several banks and the consultants that advise them. He recently requested information from a dozen banks over potential currency manipulation.

As the DFS does not have criminal authority all actions against individuals will have to be pursued through civil remedies such as fines.

“We think about it most in the area where there has been some sort of intentional misconduct as opposed to a systemic industry wide problem,” Mr Lawsky said. In addition to suspensions, industry bans and clawbacks, Mr Lawsky said he is also considering laying out the allegations in more detail to expose bad actors, which he hopes will deter people from getting into trouble.

The Department of Justice and other regulators have been criticised for not bringing charges against individuals and instead extracting large fines from banks to resolve allegations of misconduct.

Here's hoping that this will eventually result in senior people (and I don't just mean the usual non-white suspects like Raj Rajaratnam) ending up behind bars.

When former Senator and Goldman "Vampire Squid" Sachs CEO Jon Corzine and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin are sentenced to a few years in the hoosegow, I'll throw a f%$#ing party.

^*It's the DNRC, man.

This Takedown is Worthy of Matt Taibbi

On The Baffler Alex Pareene systematically demolishes New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin's dealings, and double dealings with, the finance industry:

The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.

How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCormicks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.

Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.

………

In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture:

DealBook caters to a high-level audience of C-Suite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.

The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible:

Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.

So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.

And then there is this delicious bit:

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

This is really a thing of beauty.

Read the whole thing.

I am adding Alex Pareene to my list of, "People I Do Not Want to Piss Off."

This Would Not Have Happened Without Snowden Leaks

The FISA Court just rejected the NSA's request to hold onto to phone metadata forever:

A federal surveillance court has rejected the Obama administration's bid to hold onto millions of phone records beyond the current five-year limit.

The ruling is a rare rebuke for the government from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court has rejected less than 1 percent of government spying requests over the past 30 years.

But Judge Reggie Walton said he found the Justice Department's argument for extending the retention of phone records "simply unpersuasive."

Government lawyers had argued that they needed to retain the data as evidence for the slew of privacy lawsuits filed in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks about National Security Agency surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are suing to shut the program down, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.

………

But the federal judge noted that none of the privacy groups have tried to force the NSA to hold onto the data for their lawsuits. He wrote that the groups are seeking "the destruction of the [telephone] metadata, not its retention."

Walton concluded that there is no legal requirement for the NSA to retain the data, and that any motivation for retaining the records is outweighed by the privacy harm.

Without Snowden, there would never have been the lawsuits, and even if there had been the suits, without the focus on the rubber stamp nature of the FISA court, the request would simply have been quietly granted.

Thank you Edward Joseph Snowden.

Well, I Guess That It's Better than Being Hit By a Bus (Or Not)

Charlie Pierce listened to Sarah Palin's closing speech at CPAC:

By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country's politics. If you think she's a legitimate political leader, you're an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.

Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.

………

A friend bailed on the speech, making the very plausible case that Palin is simply another political celebrity freakshow, like Donald Trump. I can see the point there but, with Palin, and watching the hysterical reception her puerile screed received, there is something more serious going on. She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country's reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you're an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

Actually, no.

Last year, my car got totaled by a tour bus while CPAC was going on, and it's clear that Mr. Pierce had a WAY worse time this year at CPAC than I did last year getting hit by a bus.

Sarah Palin riffed on Green Eggs and Ham.

Read the whole thing, and shudder.