Over at NewTeeVee there’s an interesting post by Jackson on the struggle that the MPAA et al have had coming up with a specification for allowing you to make “managed copies” of your purchased content. Of course, the fact that each successive specification is cracked within weeks of its drafting would deter the efforts of any organization compelled by logic and customer responsiveness, but this is the MPAA we’re talking about.

The problem is that the RIAA/MPAA cabal have effectively tied their own hands, by petitioning the supreme court in their fruitless pursuit of Peer-to-Peer networks for a judgment. They may have, way back in 2005, gotten more than they bargained for when Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter said:

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”

Oops. Now the MPAA and electronics manufacturers, under such a sweeping definition, could themselves become liable for the copying and redistribution of material. In fact, they can’t produce a standard which they know has been haxx0red and unleash it on the market.

And as EFF’s Susan Crawford has pointed out, they’re in league with even the network carriers to take us all backward in time. In draft language, the FCC is asserting that it:

(a) has authority to adopt such regulations governing digital audio broadcast transmissions and digital audio receiving devices that are appropriate to control the unauthorized copying and redistribution of digital audio content by or over digital reception devices, related equipment, and digital networks, including regulations governing permissible copying and redistribution of such audio content….

This means that they will be ceaselessly back to the drawing board perfecting easily-hacked technologies, and layering their media with difficult to use interfaces, handshakes, and protocols (as I found out when I had my my run-in with HDCP). The result is that media coming through official retail channels such as Best Buy or the iTunes Music Store that you try to watch on your PVR or HD-DVD player will be more difficult to view and manipulate than the DIVX-encoded material you download by fiddling with a BitTorrent client.

P2P has traditionally existed aside from the mainstream by nature of the fact that it’s a fairly high-friction model for obtaining and viewing digital content. You might not have the right CODEC libraries to view your favourite British TV show, or you might have trouble configuring your linksys router so that all the P2P traffic passes through to the right computer in your house optimally, as examples.

Traditional media (DVDs, Cable TV, etc.) have always dominated the mainstream because they’ve been easy to handle, easy to watch, and of course easy to get. For some of us, that convenience in itself is the primary value of such media, and why lots of us still buy stuff at Best Buy even when we can and do also use file sharing networks like eDonkey.

But imagine if the stuff you bought at Best Buy no longer worked together without Herculean effort. Imagine if the HD-DVD you brought home or the Streamed HD Movie you paid for on your PVR were hobbled by characteristics that made them hard to use. Furthermore, ask yourself why, after ten years of Pay-Per-View Movies, we still have video rental stores?

The answer is the consumer market’s innate resistance to difficulty, and our desire to not have the means in which we consume information dictated by the CEO of some sandbagged, heretofore unknown, media company.

When the media companies set the barriers higher and higher for consuming their material the old-fashioned way, they’re practically begging the mainstream, using the Internet, to route right around them. When they make us all experts in HDCP handshaking, HDMI systems integration, and the finer nuances of Dolby versus DTS Surround Sound, they lower the barriers to grabbing and viewing our entertainment and information on that most dreaded of all platforms: the computer, and the internet.

And despite 20 solid years of effort, media companies have been profoundly unsuccessful in combating what we do on our computers once we get their stuff in our hands. And even with a Bush government, the DMCA, and legions of lawyers they have had little concrete impact except to increase the friction and lower the value of the mainstream consumer media.

I can see this through to its logical conclusion. Computers, software, and the internet will increasingly transact our consumption of movies, music, and what we will one day say we used to call “TV shows”. The big media distribution companies will increasingly become unnecessary, and will have cut themselves out of the action.

And in my view, they’d deserve it.

-Ian.

Sometimes I can’t believe what I read..

-Ian.

——— http://www.msnbc.com/news/944890.asp?0cl=cR&cp1=1

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 28 —  Over the past six weeks a small but intense war has been conducted in the mud-hut villages and lush palm groves along the Tigris River valley, fought with far different methods than those used in the campaign that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

AS IRAQI FIGHTERS launched guerrilla strikes, the U.S. Army adopted a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries, and found new ways to gather intelligence about them, according to dozens of soldiers and officers interviewed over the last week.        Thousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained over the six-week period, many temporarily, in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night. In the expansive region north of Baghdad patrolled by the 4th Infantry Division, more than 300 Iraqi fighters were killed in combat operation, the military officials said. In the same period, U.S. forces in all of Iraq have suffered 39 combat deaths. The continuing casualties — such as the four soldiers killed Saturday — are the direct result of the intensified U.S. offensive, the military officials added.        Despite their losses, Army officers and soldiers asserted that they are making solid gains in this region, where most of the fighting has taken place and where about half the 150,000 U.S. troops in the country are posted.        At the beginning of June, before the U.S. offensives began, the reward for killing an American soldier was about $300, an Army officer said. Now, he said, street youths are being offered as much as $5,000 — and are being told that if they refuse, their families will be killed, a development the officer described as a sign of reluctance among once-eager youths to take part in the strikes.

       At the same time, the frequency of attacks has declined in the area northwest of Baghdad dominated by Iraq’s Sunni minority, long a base of support for Hussein. In this triangle-shaped region — delineated by Baghdad, Tikrit to the north and the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi to the west — attacks on U.S. forces have dropped by half since mid-June, military officers reported.        That decrease is leading senior commanders here to debate whether the war is nearly over. Some say the resistance by members of Hussein’s Baath Party is nearly broken. But other senior officers are bracing for a new phase in which they fear that Baathist die-hards, with no alternative left, will shift from attacking the U.S. military to bombing American civilians and Iraqis who work with them.        In addition, there is general agreement among Army leaders here that in recent weeks both the quality and quantity of intelligence being offered by Iraqis has greatly improved, leading to such operations as the one last Tuesday in Mosul that killed Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay.        Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

       The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.         THE U.S. OFFENSIVE        In the weeks after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, there were growing signs of resistance in the Sunni triangle, where many former Baath Party operatives, intelligence officers, and Special Republican Guard members were still actively fighting the U.S. military.        Rocket-propelled grenade attacks on U.S. vehicles began in earnest near the end of the month. On May 30, a sophisticated three-point ambush was launched against U.S. troops patrolling in the town of Bayji, just north of Tikrit. As U.S. troops evaded one line of fire, they were attacked by the next. When troops fired back, the Iraqis continued to fight instead of running.        On June 7, a patrol of U.S. military police drove into the town of Thuluya, on a big bend in the Tigris River southeast of Tikrit. Iraqis there told them to leave, and warned that if they came back, they would be killed, said a U.S. commander. It was then that “we started to kick down doors,” recalled a senior Central Command official.        Instead of leaving, at 2 a.m. the next morning, hundreds of U.S. troops cordoned off Thuluya and hundreds more conducted searches throughout the town. F-15 fighters and Apache helicopters whirred overhead, ready to launch missiles on ground commanders’ call. U.S. military speedboats patrolled the Tigris River, cutting off an escape route. The aggressive operation set the tone for the new phase of the war.

       Since then, the Army has sought to keep up an unrelenting pace. “The reality is that in this company, we’ve been doing raids and cordon searches nearly every day” since early June, said Capt. Brian Healey, commander of an infantry company based near Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Over the past six weeks, he said, sitting on a cot in an old Iraqi military base, his unit alone has detained nearly 100 people.        “I figure you can either sit barricaded in your base camp, or take the fight to the enemy,” said Lt. Col. Larry “Pepper” Jackson, commander of an Army outpost on the outskirts of, which is still described as hostile by U.S. military intelligence analysts. “Our key to success is staying on the offense. But you don’t do it recklessly, because then you’d lose the people.”        He said he has two patrols on the streets of Bayji at any given time. His troops are still attacked, but as a result of the new tactics, “It is a lot quieter — about half as much contact as in May.”        Three major U.S. operations unfolded over the past two months. In the first one in June, Peninsula Strike, U.S. commanders learned that much of the opposition was coming from Baath Party operatives and their allies in the old Iraqi intelligence services. Desert Scorpion, aimed at cutting off escape routes for fugitive Iraqi leaders, came in late June. It began with 56 simultaneous large-scale raids across central Iraq and brought in a hoard of intelligence. Among those netted was Abid Hamid Mahmud, Hussein’s trusted aide. “That was a big event,” recalled a senior Army official. “He has revealed a lot. He knew where all the safe houses and ratlines were.” Ratlines is an Army term for escape routes.        The third major operation, dubbed Soda Mountain, was the first expressly preemptive effort. Concerned about the threat of an offensive tied to July 17, the 35th anniversary of the day Hussein’s Baath Party took power, U.S. troops rounded up 600 party operatives. “We were aggressive and out there, looking to preclude attacks,” the official said. For example, for six days leading up to the holiday, every car leaving Bayji — a town of 30,000 sitting astride Iraq’s major north-south highway — was stopped at a checkpoint, and many were searched.                U.S. officials say they began to see a significant payoff from the series of operations early this month, when the number of attacks began to decline and Iraqis began to provide more information about the resistance. “When you have one operation after another, there is a cumulative effect,” the Army official said. “The effect of all these operations was that walk-in humint” — human intelligence — doubled from early June to mid-July. What’s more, he said, “it was very good quality.”        Tips began paying off so quickly that officials would launch one raid before another was completed, allowing troops to catch some targets off guard because they didn’t know that fellow resistance fighters had been apprehended. Iraqi resistance fighters in the Sunni triangle at first tried to attack U.S. forces directly with AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. While some killed U.S. troops, many attempts were ineffective. So in recent weeks, military officers said, Iraqi fighters have turned to other weapons.        “They’ve gone to standoff weapons — mines and mortars, and IEDs” — improvised explosive devices, or bombs — said Capt. John Taylor, the intelligence officer for the base near Bayji.        Last Wednesday, a tank from the base hit an antitank mine for the first time since its unit came to Iraq in April. Lt. Erik Aadland, a former resident of Springfield, Va., was standing in the turret of his tank as it was returning to base after a patrol through Bayji. With the tank just a stone’s throw from the front gate, the mine exploded. “Everything went red,” he recalled. “Then we were covered in black smoke.” Aadland and his crew dismounted and stared at the damage: The right track was blown off, the fender above it twisted upward and three armored panels weighing a total of about 1,100 pounds had been hurled about 90 feet away.

       Iraqi fighters have adjusted their tactics in other ways. Upon learning that their homes were being targeted for raids, Baath Party operatives often moved their weapons, cash and documents into the homes of neighbors, military officials said. In turn, U.S. forces expanded the scope of their raids. “The past six weeks, our patrols have gotten more aggressive, much more frequent,” said Healey, the infantry company commander. “Instead of doing one house, for example, we’ll do a whole street.”        Likewise, Iraqi fighters learned the U.S. military is most comfortable operating at night, when it stands to gain the most from its technical advantages, such as night-vision goggles. Some fighters started going back to their homes in midday, and even holding meetings then, U.S. military officials said.        But in military operations, for every action there is a reaction. Hogg, the 2nd Brigade commander, noted this as he sat in a Humvee on Wednesday afternoon, clenching the butt of a Dominican cigar in his teeth. “The knuckleheads kind of figured out that we like to operate at night, so they started operating during the day, so we starting hitting them during the day,” he said as he waited for one of his battalions to launch a daylight raid. “It’s harder, because of the crowds, but it’s also effective.”        Underscoring the intense nature of the combat, Hogg’s brigade, after weeks of being pestered by enemy mortars, has begun responding with heavy artillery, and so far this month has fired more than 60 high-explosive 155 mm shells.        Some Army units have modified their equipment to help them adjust to urban warfare. At least two battalions in the 4th Infantry Division have mounted .50 caliber heavy machine guns on the back of the pickup-truck version of their Humvees, vehicles sometimes used to carry infantry troops to raids. “Gun-vees,” which resembles the “technicals” used by Somali fighters, are especially useful in battling guerrilla fighters in alleys and other tight urban spaces where tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles cannot maneuver.        The modified vehicle also provides a helpful element of surprise, said Jackson, the U.S. commander near Bayji. “A Humvee can sneak up for a raid,” he said. “A tank you can hear a mile away.”        After the fighting is over, U.S. military officials say, it becomes important to repair the damage — a door smashed, a wall breached, an irrigation culvert flattened by a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. Every U.S. brigade commander in Iraq has a “Commander’s Emergency Repair Fund” of $200,000 that is replenished as he spends it. Over the past six weeks of the U.S. offensive, commanders across Iraq dispensed $13 million to rebuild schools, clinics, water treatment plans and police stations, said Army Col. David MacEwen, who helps coordinate the civic works.

       “During Peninsula Strike, we worked very hard for every combat action to have a ‘carrot’ that followed,” MacEwen said. “We’d do a cordon and search in one area, and then make sure the next day that LPG [cooking gas] was available, or that a pump at a water plant was working.”        The efforts aren’t just aimed at winning hearts and minds, but also at gaining intelligence. “When you’re out doing the civil affairs operations, you get a lot of people coming up and giving you good information,” said Maj. David Vacchi, the operations officer for a battalion operating just northeast of Baghdad.

       Senior U.S. commanders here are so confident about their recent successes that they have begun debating whether victory is in sight. “I think we’re at the hump” now, a senior Central Command official said. “I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly” — possibly within a couple of months, he added.        Hogg, whose troops are still engaged in combat every day, agreed. “I think we’re fixing to turn the corner,” he said Thursday. “I think the operations over the next couple of weeks will get us there.”                 Staff researcher Robert Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.                 © 2003 The Washington Post Company

FIRST: MILITARY SUPPLIES Who Sold What to Iraq? The U.S. aims to hunt down companies that supplied Saddam. FORTUNE Sunday, March 30, 2003 By Nelson D. Schwartz

When the first wave of American soldiers swept out of the desert and headed north toward Baghdad, the Iraqis weren’t the only ones who experienced shock and awe. In the thick of battle, U.S. commanders discovered that the Iraqi army was able to jam the global-positioning systems the military uses to pinpoint everything from cruise missile attacks to the location of troops on the ground. “It was a technological preemptive strike,” says a senior military source.

It was also a prime example of how private companies violated the embargo that the U.S. and the United Nations imposed on Iraq more than a decade ago. Russian firms supplied the jammers to Iraq in the past few years–they didn’t exist during the first Gulf war–prompting a personal protest from President Bush to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The news about the GPS-blocking devices is just the beginning of what’s likely to be a series of revelations detailing how companies–including American ones–helped supply Saddam Hussein’s war machine during the past decade. That’s because in addition to searching for weapons of mass destruction, U.S. forces are scouring Iraq for evidence of who sold what to Saddam. Military sources have told FORTUNE that special teams are already on the ground, sifting through files to determine where Iraq got everything from rocket parts to fiber-optic technology.

Despite both U.S. laws and UN sanctions that prohibited all but a handful of commercial dealings with Baghdad, there have been persistent reports that companies from Russia, France, and China, among others, were breaking the embargo. And when the evidence in Iraq is analyzed, says a top Washington official who deals with trade policy, it’s likely that at least a few U.S. companies will face fines or perhaps even criminal prosecution. “The fact that American companies have broken the embargo with Iran suggests that there will be some leads in Iraq,” adds the government official, who spoke with FORTUNE on condition of anonymity. “Those of us in law enforcement certainly contemplate that things will be found in Iraq.”

Probing the byzantine web of deals that kept technology flowing to Iraq is a complex job. It’s likely to involve teams from the Treasury, State, and Commerce departments, as well as the Pentagon and the CIA. For now the main task is locating the forbidden goods–and their paper trail. Sources say units made up of both military personnel and representatives of the CIA and other agencies have been trained to operate in volatile areas inside Iraq, taking inventory of contraband items and poring over records.

Similar task forces operated after the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and NATO’s intervention in the Balkans in the mid-1990s, but this time the job is much bigger. Because of Iraq’s oil riches, Saddam had a far easier time of evading the embargo than did former dictators like Manuel Noriega and Slobodan Milosevic. Fixing blame can be tough, however. Business transactions with embargoed nations are usually conducted through intermediaries, with China and the United Arab Emirates as common transshipment points.

To further complicate matters, U.S. companies might innocently sell something to a Chinese buyer, only to learn later that it ended up in Iraq. For example, says Kelly Motz of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, China’s giant Huawei Technologies is believed to have supplied Saddam’s army with sophisticated communications hardware even as it was doing business with the likes of IBM, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, and Qualcomm. “These companies might have thought they were just selling telecom equipment into an emerging Asian market,” says Motz. “However, it’s been known since early 2001 that Huawei has had dealings with Iraq. So any deals that might have been done since then are questionable.”

If it turns out that companies intentionally evaded the ban, government officials say they are loaded for bear. “We won’t tolerate the breaking of the embargo,” says Richard Newcomb, director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. “If there’s a knowing violation, we would prosecute to the full extent of the law.” In 2001, the Commerce Department hit McDonnell Douglas, a unit of Boeing, with a $2.12 million fine for improperly selling machine tools to China. Fines for dealing with Iraq are likely to be larger. And if evidence turns up that a particular firm knowingly sold items like night-vision goggles or gas masks to Iraq, federal agencies might impose what they call the “death penalty”–a total ban on all exports by the guilty firm. Criminal charges for executives are also a distinct possibility.

It’s going to take time to determine just who did business with Iraq. But the military, for one, seems eager to shine a light in some otherwise dark corners. “We will have everything at our disposal,” says Maj. Max Blumenfeld, an officer with Army’s V Corps in Kuwait. Documenting Iraq’s deals, he says, “will justify this operation and show the world what we’ve been saying all along about Saddam Hussein and his efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” It could also cause a lot of companies to wish they’d never done business with Baghdad.

Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

IMAGES TO EXPLODE THE MYTHS OF WAR

Mar 24 2003

BRIAN READE on why these pictures will lead to more horrors closer to home

THE men in suits assured us it would be swift, precise and decent. Those in khaki, such as General Tommy Franks, boasted the military machine was so efficient it would be “a campaign like no other in history”.

But, as we have seen in the images thrown up by the most televisual war ever, it’s the same old dirty, nasty game.

SUFFERING: An Iraqi man wounded during attacks on Basra

The elderly riddled with shrapnel and drenched in blood, babies with half their faces burned and mutilated soldiers lying in the trenches, expose how Baghdad and Basra today are simply modern equivalents of Dresden and Coventry.

No matter how smart your bombs are, war is about laying waste to cities and people. It is about pain and suffering and the kind of blind panic that has you firing into a river to kill what you think is a stricken pilot.

And this time the world is seeing it played out 24 hours a day on a dozen TV channels. Which might be not only the undoing of Bush and Blair but also the fuse which sets the anger of the Arab world alight.

SHOCKING AND AWFUL: Allied forces blitz Baghdad on Friday night

Because this highly-addictive TV coverage has exploded the myth of the precise and blood-free war. It has reminded us that war should always be a last resort – and in this case it is nowhere near it.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The propagandists at Allied command gave unprecedented access to journalists and camera crews in the hope of showing how merciful their mission was.

But the many sickening sights we have seen have only strengthened the belief held by the majority of the world, that this is a futile and immoral attack on people who currently threaten no outsiders. Where are the chemical attacks? Where are Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

Where are the links to international terrorists? Where are the millions of oppressed Iraqis defecting en masse to their liberators? Where are all the Iraqi lies?

INNOCENT: A child burned during the bombing of Baghdad screams in pain

BAGHDAD has been as honest or dishonest as Washington. Following Friday’s cataclysmic attack you might have expected them to claim hundreds of dead civilians.

Instead they said there were three.

What of our side? The Americans claimed to have taken Umm Qasr two days ago, with their sickeningly triumphal raising of the Stars and Stripes. Yesterday they were still fighting. We were told the people of the south, Shi’ite Muslims who despise Saddam, would surrender without resistance. Some have. But many others are trying to repel the invaders.

SLAUGHTER: Bodies of Iraqi soldiers huddled dead in a trench in Southern Iraq – their white flag couldn’t save them

We are not being given the full truth. We see screaming babies in ramshackle hospitals, stripped bare of supplies by a dozen years of medicine sanctions, and we despair at the lie that this war is a humanitarian mission to help a stricken people.

We see innocent civilians killed and maimed in their dilapidated homes, and we just don’t know why it is happening in our name.

All we can conclude, especially after the astonishing blitz of Baghdad, is that Iraq is the testing ground for a devastating show of American might, aimed at warning enemies that if they step out of line they will be next. You cannot understate how dangerous this situation is for the leader of a Labour government. If Tony Blair loses the propaganda war it will destroy his credibility and possibly his career. The British will be tough on his war crimes and tough on the causes of them.

TRIUMPH?: the Stars and Stripes go up over Umm Qasr

But that is the least of our worries. You see, we are not the only ones following this war through a close-up lens. So too are the Arabs.

And they saw something the other day that our propagandists do not yet admit to. The carnage in Basra’s Jumhuriya hospital following coalition bombing which Iraq claims killed 77 civilians.

Al Jazeera TV beamed images across the Arab world of the dead and wounded, including a child with the back of its skull blown off. “It was a massacre,” wailed one woman.

Imagine what effect that had on an already raging Arab world. Then imagine what future images of shock and awe we might soon see on our own doorstep.

WIRED: Issue 11.02 – February 2003

The Marshall Plan

For 40 years, the man Pentagon insiders call Yoda has foreseen the future of war – from battlefield bots rolling off radar-proof ships to GIs popping performance pills. And that was before the war on terror.

By Douglas McGray

Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s 81-year-old futurist-in-chief, fiddles with his security badge, squints, looks away, smiles, and finally speaks in a voice that sounds like Gene Hackman trying not to wake anybody. Known as Yoda in defense circles, Marshall doesn’t need to shout to be heard. Named director of the Office of Net Assessment by Richard Nixon and reappointed by every president since, the DOD’s most elusive official has become one of its most influential. Today, Marshall – along with his star protégés Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz – is drafting President Bush’s plan to upgrade the military. Supporters believe the force he envisions will be faster and more lethal; critics say it relies on unproven technology. As US troops gathered overseas, Marshall sat for a rare interview.

WIRED: Until recently, defense planners talked about a “revolution in military affairs.” Now the buzzword is “transformation.” Why the change? MARSHALL: Transformation is more of an imperative: We’ve got to transform the force. I personally don’t like the term. It tends to push people in the direction of changing the whole force. You need to be thinking about changing some small part of the force more radically, as a way of exploring what new technologies can really do for you.

What is the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield? “One future intelligence problem: knowing what drugs the other guys are on.” One that’s still under way is the emergence of a variety of precision weapons, and also coupling them with sensors. Another is the ability to coordinate the activities of separate elements of the forces to a level that has never been possible before. That’s promising, but less far along than precision weapons. A third is robotic devices: unmanned vehicles, of which the UAVs are the furthest along, but also similar kinds of devices undersea, and smaller devices that might change urban warfare by being able to crawl through buildings.

Are there revolutionary developments that don’t involve combat? There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I don’t mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects, like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person.

Did 9/11 change your mind about anything? Not much. It was obvious that we were wide open to attack.

Has anything happened that surprised you? The rapidity of the collapse of the Soviet Union surprised me. I thought they were in trouble, but the rapidity and completeness of the withdrawal were really striking.

Is there a precedent for one country staying on top through a series of military revolutions? Or does one country always leapfrog another? Through most of the 19th century, the British Navy exhibited that kind of thing. But it was quite interesting the way they did it. They tended to let other countries, mainly France, do the early experiments and come out with new kinds of ships. If something looked like a good idea, they could come in and quickly overtake the innovator. They seemed to do that as a way of capitalizing on their advantage and saving resources.

Isn’t the United States in a similar position now? That’s probably the case. But some of the countries that would be candidates to make innovations aren’t doing it. The Japanese and West Europeans aren’t really making big changes. The Swedes are an interesting case. For 200 years their basic problem was the possibility of a large-scale land invasion by the Russians. They’ve decided that that has gone away. If anything could happen, it would happen across the Baltic. So they’re rethinking, given modern technology, how to create a defense largely on sea frontiers. It’s possible that they will make some innovations that we’ll pick up and capitalize on.

For instance? They’ve designed three new naval vessels. One is an air-independent submarine [running on fuel cells rather than nuclear power, which allows it to travel almost silently and remain submerged for extended periods]. They have a surface ship that’s a bit more conventional. And then a radically new naval vessel called the Visby, which has practically no metal in it other than the engine. It’s constructed to be very stealthy.

You’re known for following technology outside the traditional realm of national security. Pharmaceuticals, for instance. People who are connected with neural pharmacology tell me that new classes of drugs will be available relatively shortly, certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like natural chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying and performance-enhancing characteristics. One of the people I talk to jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on.

In an era of terrorism and peacekeeping, are Cold War ideas based on striking a big enemy from afar and defending against missile attack still relevant? Yes, if we want to stay in the business of long-range power projection. And if we play the role of intervening in messy disputes, some of this weaponry is still useful, as it was in Afghanistan. However, we need ground forces to go in and keep the peace.

Does new technology ultimately make us more or less vulnerable? A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is to draw a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves, and how that has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn’t very many for a long time, and now it’s going up. In that sense, it’s not just the US. All the world is getting less safe.

Douglas McGray interviewed J. Craig Venter in Wired 10.12.

———–

By Javier David

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Magazine named two women who uncovered massive accounting fraud at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. and a third who detailed FBI (news – web sites) failures after the Sept. 11 attacks as its 2002 “Persons of the Year” on Sunday.

Photo Reuters Photo

The magazine praised Sherron Watkins, a vice president at Enron, and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, as well as Coleen Rowley, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for exposing malfeasance that eroded public confidence in their institutions.

“It came down to did we want to recognize a phenomenon that helped correct some of the problems we’ve had over the last year and celebrate three ordinary people that did extraordinary things,” Time managing editor Jim Kelly said.

In May, Rowley wrote a scathing 13-page memo to FBI Director Robert Muller detailing how supervisors at a Minneapolis, Minnesota, field office brushed aside her requests to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, weeks before they occurred.

Watkins, a former accountant, is best known for a blunt, prescient 7-page memo to Enron chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that uncovered questionable accounting and warned that the company could “implode in a wave of accounting scandals.”

Her letter came to light during an inquiry Congress conducted after the company declared bankruptcy.

Cooper undertook a one-woman crusade inside telecommunications behemoth WorldCom, after she discovered that the company had disguised $3.8 billion in losses through improper accounting.

When the scandal came to light in June after that company declared bankruptcy, jittery investors laid siege to global stock markets.

SELECTIONS APPLAUDED

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (news – web sites) and a leading congressional advocate for whistle-blower protections, applauded Time’s selection.

“Sherron Watkins’ example helped us enact the first corporate whistle-blower protections in history. Cynthia Cooper also showed the good that can come when courageous whistle-blowers come forward. Coleen Rowley’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is leading to FBI reforms,” Leahy said in a statement.

Other people considered by the magazine, which hits stores on Monday, included President Bush (news – web sites), al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news – web sites), Vice President Dick Cheney (news – web sites) and New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

Bush was seen by some as the front-runner, especially after he led his party to a mid-term electoral upset in November that cemented the Republican majority in Congress.

However, Kelly said, “Some of (Bush’s) own goals: the capture of Osama bin Laden, the unseating of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites), the revival of a sluggish economy, haven’t happened yet. There was a sense of bigger things to come, and it might be wise to see how things played out.”

FBI agent and lawyer Rowley’s secret memo was leaked to the press in May. Weeks before Sept. 11, Rowley suspected Moussaoui might have ties to radical activities and bin Laden, and she asked supervisors for clearance to search his computer.

Her letter sharply criticized the agency’s hidebound culture and its decision-makers, and gave rise to new inquiries over the intelligence-gathering failures of Sept. 11, 2001.

The magazine’s 2001 Person of the Year was former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (news – web sites), for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which killed 3,000 people.

———–

WASHINGTON

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under its new chairman, Richard Lugar, should make its first order of business an inquiry into President Bush’s maladroit and shortsighted decision-making in the So San affair.

Our National Security Agency, to its credit, spotted the movement of 15 Scud missiles and 85 drums of chemicals from a factory in North Korea to its secret loading aboard the freighter So San, and tracked the unflagged ship around the world to the Arabian Sea.

The C.I.A. was unable to determine the customer of these offensive weapons, unreliable in military combat but useful in striking terror into cities. State and Defense, worried that the ultimate customer might be Iraq, enlisted the Spanish Navy in stopping and boarding the vessel.

Apparently nobody thought the crisis through enough to ask: What do we do when we find the missiles? What if they are destined for an ally in the war on Al Qaeda like Egypt or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? What’s our policy on the movement of terror weapons into a tinderbox?

Then came Saleh into our alley. The dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh (pronounced sally), claimed the destructive cargo, for which I am told he had paid North Korea $41 million.

U.S. officials were thunderstruck. Had Saleh not solemnly assured us 18 months ago, when we purchased his support in the war on terror, that he would no longer buy Scuds from North Korea? His disputes with the Saudis and Eritreans were long since resolved; the only logical explanation was that he planned to re-sell the secret shipment at a whopping profit to a nation or group that did not wish us well.

The Yemeni insisted he had bought the missiles years before he made his promise to us and just never got around to telling us about it. Nobody believed that, but Saleh lets us kill Al Qaeda leaders on his territory, and our knowledge of this shipment means he won’t be able to re-sell it easily.

So President Bush decided to sacrifice the principle of the interdiction of terror weaponry entering a war zone on the altar of practicality. Instead of suggesting a fair compromise — “We’ll reimburse you for your $41 million purchase, and we’ll impound the cargo” — he chose to appease an unreliable ally and turned the 15 missiles, with the unidentified chemicals, over to the man who had made the U.S. look foolish.

Because the news of our turnover broke before we had alerted Madrid, we humiliated a real ally, Spain, which — at our request — had put its sailors’ lives at risk by firing across the bow of a hostile vessel and boarding it. Spain has been a stalwart European supporter against Saddam, and is almost alone with us in urging Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Our So San signal to eight other U.S. allies patrolling waters against Al Qaeda in the region: Go out on a limb for America, then watch us saw the limb off behind you.

Meanwhile, the interdiction of this unflagged ship on the high seas was seized upon as an insult by the North Koreans. Pyongyang trumpeted plans to start up plutonium production, which could be seen as a provocative use of Saleh’s fungible $41 million.

The Bush administration’s embarrassment at this irate reaction to its high-seas flip-flop was heightened by former President Bill Clinton. He struck a fierce pose in Rotterdam: “We actually drew up plans to attack North Korea and destroy their reactors,” the retroactive hawk told a security forum, “and we told them we would attack unless they ended their nuclear program.” (Talk about secrecy: Who knew, in 1994, that those cowboys in the Clinton White House were threatening preventive war?)

The So San affair, still shrouded in diplomatic secrecy, does not show the vaunted Bush national security team at its best. With plenty of time provided by satellite intelligence, Bush did not formulate plans to deal with operational contingencies; humiliated by a Yemeni double-crosser, the president had the White House spokesman retreat into pettifoggery to explain away a policy flinch on the spread of terror’s weaponry.

Yes, we need unstable Yemen’s help at the moment. But President Bush is duty bound to drive home the message to our least savory “partners” that they need America more.

———–

Want to find out about the anti-war movement in America? Forget network news and tune in to Jerry Springer, says Duncan Campbell

Tuesday December 10, 2002

Tom Hayden was one of the main figures in the anti-Vietnam movement in the Sixties, arrested in 1968 during the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago and charged as a member of the Chicago Eight.

So it was interesting to see him addressing a gathering at the Westwood United Methodist Church in Los Angeles last weekend, called “Beyond the Battlefield – the Real Costs of War” and comparing the national mood then and now.

Opposition to the war on Iraq was far greater, he said, than the opposition to the war in Vietnam at a similar stage. But he did not feel that this was reflected by the media. “The anti-war movement does not have a voice in the national debate equal to our numbers,” he told 1,400-strong gathering at the church. “The corporate media has ignored or trivialised the movement … the talk shows are filled with right-wing pundits or failed military officials.”

He criticised both the New York Times and the public television network PBS for underestimating the numbers at the recent anti-war demonstrations in Washington.

So does the media deliberately ignore the opponents of a war in Iraq? Two journalists, one from the New York Times and one from the LA Times, addressed this issue in a lunchtime meeting at the day-long conference.

The NY Times journalist, Bernie Weinraub, acknowledged – as did the paper itself at the time – that a mistake had been made in under-reporting the demonstration. A long article covering the anti-war movement appeared shortly afterwards. But he said that people could not expect that every small demonstration was worthy of a new story.

The LA Times journalist, Robin Abearian, said her paper had already set up a war desk and she had asked them who had been assigned to cover the peace movement, which had now been taken on board. Regarding the lack of coverage of 80,000 people marching against the war in San Francisco that same weekend, she said, “sometimes bad calls are made”.

Many in a sometimes hostile audience clearly believed that the mainstream media has been deliberately under-reporting the extent of the anti-war movement. This is delicate territory for the media. The Guardian has often been criticised over the years for not covering marches and demonstrations or for not giving them the weight they deserve. The issue has been the subject of more than one article by our readers’ editor.

But what is noticeable about the television news in the US at the moment is a lack of any of the voices to which Tom Hayden referred. The war is now covered almost as a given with whole segments devoted to scaring everyone to death with talk of smallpox or anthrax and retired military and diplomatic gents speculating endlessly at third or fourth hand.

It took Jerry Springer, of all people, to say the unsayable – that most ordinary Americans are very keen on tackling Osama bin Laden and al Qaida, but have no great interest in extending the war to Iraq. All a war would achieve, he said, would be to create a whole new generation of people who hated Americans and it was thus patriotic to oppose the war.

This week, dozens of well-known actors will sign a letter to President Bush expressing their opposition to the war. Last week, hundreds of clerics of all faiths did the same in a full page advertisement in the New York Times. It will be interesting to see whether all this now starts to get as much coverage as all the military hardware and smallpox.

Email duncan.campbell [at] guardian.co [dot] uk

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Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool By Paul Boutin 02:00 AM Dec. 06, 2002 PT

SANTA CLARA, California — Attention, Wi-Fi users: The Department of Homeland Security sees wireless networking technology as a terrorist threat.

That was the message from experts who participated in working groups under federal cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke and shared what they learned at this week’s 802.11 Planet conference. Wi-Fi manufacturers, as well as home and office users, face a clear choice, they said: Secure yourselves or be regulated.

“Homeland Security is putting people in place who will be in a position to say, ‘If you’re going to get broken into … we’re going to start regulating,'” said Cable and Wireless security architect Shannon Myers in a panel dubbed “Homeland Security vs. Wi-Fi.”

Myers was one of several consultants for President Bush’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, which is finalizing its National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.

Since being named special advisor to the president for cyberspace security last year, Clarke has stressed wireless access points as a national security threat.

“Companies throughout the country have networks that are wide open because of wireless LANs…. Millions of houses are getting connected, which means that more and more are getting vulnerable,” Clarke told attendees at the Black Hat Security Briefings in Las Vegas earlier this year.

“We know that (an attack) could bring down the network of this country very quickly. Once you’re on the network, it doesn’t matter where you got in,” said Daniel Devasirvatham, who headed the Homeland Security task force for the Wireless Communications Association International trade association.

Devasirvatham said the telecom industry was represented at security planning talks with federal agencies, but the wireless sector itself was not.

“Do you consider yourself part of the telecom industry?” he asked the 802.11 Planet audience. “If you’re a Nethead instead of a Bellhead, you probably don’t. I think there’s a major disconnect here.”

But Myers acknowledged that regulators were frustrated in their search for a quick fix to plug Wi-Fi holes.

“There’s just not a lot of technology out there right now that can be used to secure the technology in place,” she said. “They’re not at a point where they can say, ‘This will solve the problem,’ and mandate it.”

Rather, the most recent draft of the National Strategy document lists stopgap steps that home and office Wi-Fi users should take to make their networks harder to crack. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Wireless Network Security document contains more detailed guidelines.

Speakers called on corporate Wi-Fi customers to participate in creating security enhancements and best practices, lest regulators do it for them. “Expert advice needs to be obtained from more than just the industry that makes the equipment,” Devasirvatham said.

Conference attendees were split on the potential of wireless nodes as terrorist access points.

Boingo CEO Sky Dayton suggested turnkey security standards under development would improve the technology’s reputation. “It’s possible to secure a wireless network today,” he said. “But it needs to get easier.”

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