HANFORD JUST KEEPS ON MOVING TO THE RIVER

I PROMISE NOT TO PUBLISH MORE THAN ONE STORY A MONTH ABOUT THE RADIOACTIVE DISASTER LOOMING AT HANFORD, BUT IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT IGNORED REAL NEWS WE HAVE, EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE CORRUPTION WHICH APPARENTLY HAS ENGULFED THE FAA. ANOTHER BUSH TRIUMPH. NO DOUBT KEEPING NORMAN MINETTA, A CLINTON HOLDOVER LOVED BY THE AIRLINES CONTRIBUTED. HE WAS BRAINDEAD ON ARRIVAL AND HIS SUCCESSORS APPARENTLY HAVE SIMILAR QUALIFICATIONS.

Nuclear crossroads

WESTERN ROUNDUP - April 28, 2008 by Marty Durlin

Workers at Hanford’s Cold Test Facility use this 1 million-gallon single-shelled storage tank to test equipment that will be used to clean up Hanford’s buried waste tanks. PAUL JOSEPH BROWN/SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

In Washington state, a 1-million-gallon plume of radioactive waste is seeping from Hanford Nuclear Reserve toward the Columbia River. But in Washington, D.C., Dennis Spurgeon foresees a rosy future for the Department of Energy’s nuclear program.

Last November, Spurgeon, assistant secretary for nuclear energy, assured the congressional Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the program will "promote a significant, wide-scale use of nuclear energy in a safe and secure manner ... while decreasing the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and effectively addressing the challenge of nuclear waste disposal."

It’s been three decades since a nuclear power plant has been built in the United States. Now, under the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the Energy Department is working hard to lure new proposals, adding billions in tax breaks and "cost overrun guarantees" and streamlining its licensing process with four ready-to-use designs, early site permits and a combined construction permit and operating license. The 104 nuclear power plants currently in the U.S. generate about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Some Energy Department plans call for as many as 50 new nuclear plants by 2020, producing 50,000 megawatts. Twenty-two applications are currently on file with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including proposals for plants in Utah and Idaho. Nuclear weapon development is ramping up as well, with a budget next year of $6.6 billion.

At $25 billion, the 2009 DOE’s budget request is $5 billion more than 2008. Meanwhile, the cleanup budget has plummeted for the fifth year in a row, dropping $1 billion in just the past three years, according to Jane Hedges, Washington state’s nuclear waste program manager. "We thought that was telling," she says.

The cuts have left many Western sites, including Hanford and the Idaho National Laboratory, facing setbacks in the dangerous and complicated mop-up of this country’s nuclear messes. Washington state has even threatened to sue the DOE for failing to meet the terms of the Hanford cleanup agreement.

Now considered the most contaminated site in the nation, Hanford - established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project - produced plutonium for nuclear weapons for more than 40 years. The 586-square-mile property in southeastern Washington once hosted nine nuclear reactors, five chemical separation plants and hundreds of support facilities. By 1987, all of the reactors were closed except the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear power plant in the Northwest.

The site has more than 170 massive underground steel tanks filled with acids, solvents and heavy metals, including the radioactive elements plutonium, cesium, strontium and uranium. Some 140 of the tanks are single-walled, 40 to 60 years old and "unfit for use." The original agreement called for the tanks to be cleaned out within several decades, says Hedges. But at current funding levels, with an $8 billion cleanup budget shortfall over 10 years, it will take more than a century to empty them.

---

On top of the 53 million gallons of tank waste, untold amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste languish in unlined landfills, along with 450 billion gallons of liquid waste in ponds, ditches and drain fields. The site has already contaminated 200 square miles of groundwater.

A state away, failing tanks at the Idaho National Laboratory are leaking radioactive waste generated from nuclear weapons production into the groundwater. Chromium, tritium and other contaminants have already been detected in the Snake River Plain aquifer, sole drinking water source for more than 300,000 residents of eastern Idaho.

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, fears budget shortfalls will only make things worse, leading to spills of PCBs, uranium, plutonium and hazardous chemicals, and preventing necessary equipment maintenance. Simpson, with about two dozen House colleagues, is part of the Nuclear Cleanup Caucus initiated by Doc Hastings, R-Wash., in the mid-1990s. The bipartisan group and its Senate counterpart are currently stumping for more cleanup money.

Meanwhile, permit changes at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico have postponed shipments from Idaho and added to costs. And one long-planned "solution" to the problem, the proposed Yucca Mountain repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is beset with legal, logistic and budgetary challenges. It will not open for at least another decade, if ever.

But nuclear advocates, including some prominent enviros, believe the waste issue is solvable. "It is incorrect to call it waste," writes former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, now a nuclear industry spokesman, "because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal."

Reprocessing produces waste that is intensely radioactive, toxic, thermally hot and difficult to contain, counters Susan Gordon, director of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. And, she says, costs keep rising; this year, DOE estimated cleanup costs at $225 billion, $100 billion more than last year. Sites that were to be completed by 2035 are now delayed to 2040 or even decades later, she adds, and some sites where cleanup is in progress (including Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico) are also gearing up to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons.

"As a result, cleanup becomes an ever more expensive, never-ending activity," says Gordon. "Despite years of trying to come up with a solution to high-level waste, at huge cost to taxpayers, nothing has been disposed of."

The author is HCN’s online editor.

ALMOST TWINS

http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/FullPollData.pdf)

A poll conducted by the Economist Magazine of American and British opinion on government and politics reveals a very close alignment of views. While I do not pay a lot of attention to polling, one significant difference that shows up in this poll is a difference of attitude toward religion and sex. While most respondents claim to be all right with their their children marrying out of their tradition and ethnicity, there is a substantially larger number of Americans who assert a belief in God and afterlife and a similar plurality of Americans who believe premarital sex wrong. On abortion however, there are no differences, the great majority in both countries supporting its availability in one form or another.
Overall, there are remarkable similarities toward government and politics in both countries -- negative. There is a surprisingly strong support for continuing involvement in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, although a soft majority are for withdrawing by the end of 2009, which is a lifetime in politics.
Worth a look.

WANTED: A NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

Undoubtedly you will have noticed there has not been much talk in recent years about the U.S. being the "sole superpower". The heady days when we illegally bombed Yugoslavia into submission, saving threatened minorities from murder are forgotten. Americans do not want to be reminded of their global burdens as the dollar is racing to the bottom. But we remain the global superpower and the only guarantor of the most remarkable period of economic growth in human history. None of the institutions we helped create are any longer contributing much. The U.N. is corrupt and feeble, the way the Powers want it to be. The World Bank and the I.M.F. have been outrun. There is and will be no consensus on their reform.
How we manage our return to relative equality with other, emerging great powers will largely determine whether we continue to prosper and the world continues to integrate. Obviously we cannot determine the process. It is natural that our power will decline relative to other nations as global wealth continues to grow. If you see this as the U.S. becoming weaker, you will draw one set of conclusions. If you see this as a natural and positive development, then you will draw another set of conclusions. One thing is certain: the arrangements that were established in the 1950s are definitively dead.
China was a third world country when it was established as a Great Power at the insistence of President Roosevelt in 1944. Today it is emerging as a global powerhouse. It is governed by a ruthless dictatorship opposed by a very significant minority of its people. We accept this and we should. We do not have to approve its suppression of Tibet and other minorities but it is in our interest to encourage economic development and hopefully political change in China.
But China is not alone. India, Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Japan could have them in five minutes. Until recently the vast power of the U.S. trumped most of the regional tensions and rivalries. This is not going to continue. The U.S. has very good relations with Japan and is developing ties with India. Korea is volatile and its northern dictatorship is teetering. Taiwan is struggling to figure out how to live with China without being absorbed. We do not want a war with China, but would we aid Taiwan if it is attacked? It could happen. What will happen if there is serious disorder in China? What if there is a real uprising in Tibet and other parts of Western China? Would the ruling cliques bang the drums of nationalism and attempt to seize Taiwan and Hong Kong? What will the United States do? I do not think we know. We have been locked in place for more than sixty years as the Sole Superpower.
In the last few years the U.S, has begun to change its military relationships with Japan and Korea. We are slowly, too slowly, withdrawing forces from South Korea, Okinawa and other parts of Japan and constructing a new base of operations in Guam. This is a development of great significance. At the same time our national defense strategy continues to be based on the technologies which brought us total victory in WW2. We continue to rely on the carrier groups and flights of planes to project power. The nuclear carriers we use to terrorize third world countries have never been challenged or threatened.
Nuclear carriers groups are huge targets. The Russians could never compete with us. Instead they spent a lot of effort in developing weapons to attack ours. These missile systems have been sold on to the Chinese and the Iranians. I am attaching a piece by Martin Sieff, a defense analyst, which raises significant questions about the vulnerability of carriers which were invented almost a century ago! You may recall that Admiral Rickover, the creator of the nuclear navy, aroused the ire of his bosses when he openly called for scrapping carriers as obsolescent technology -- almost four decades ago. Carriers continue to get bigger.
The article below is the fifth and final piece of a series. Those who are interested, Google Martin Sieff and read the others.
There is no question that the U.S. is the predominant military power. We should continue to be a naval power of the first rank as we were in fact even before we were the United States. Whether we have the correct configuration of naval forces to assure that is an open question.
The navy loves carriers, the Pentagon loves the Navy, and the Congress is their pimp. The development of a new national security doctrine is imperative. This doctrine will identify the forces we require and the weapons systems we need to fund and develop. The Soviet Union has been gone for almost two decades. We have not addressed the consequences of this extraordinary development. The way we have engaged in Iraq is one consequence of our failure to adjust.
I am devoted to being provocative and thoughtful. We know that an overhaul is required. Our governance is deplorable. Some of it is due to this Administration -- Iraq obviously, foreign policy generally -- some of it is deeper, structural, involving tax policy and the concentration of power in Washington and legal bureaucracies that proliferate like May flies. Some of it we may fix, some will be with us like the Roman dole to the very end.
Read the attached piece by Martin Sieff, Google him for the first four which are worth twenty minutes of your time.
Please ask your friends and others to read this if you think its worthy. And share your thoughts, friendly, disagreeable, whatever they are.

Defense Focus: Carrier strategy -- Part 5

Published: April 1, 2008 at 11:08 AM

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Russian and Chinese naval weapons designers know they lack the resources and the technology to match the awesome power of U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups ship for ship and plane for plane. So instead, for decades, they have opted for asymmetrical solutions to the problem of killing U.S. super carriers. And they have come up with some lethal weapons.

Russian military systems designers look to be able to produce large numbers of weapons based on relatively simple designs that are cost-effective and robust on the battlefield. And when confronted with U.S. weapons systems that they cannot match directly like stealth bombers or nuclear-powered super aircraft carriers, they look for asymmetrical solutions that enable them to use their own areas of expertise.

Therefore, although Russia has still to demonstrate it can successfully build and operate a modern, 21st century-era large aircraft carrier, it leads the world in designing and producing relatively cheap missile systems designed to "kill" such carriers at scores, and even hundreds of miles distance. The U.S. arsenal has no weapons to compare with the Russian-built Moskit 3M80 -- NATO designation SS-N-22 Sunburn -- ramjet-powered cruise missile or the new, even more advanced SS-N-27 Sizzler.

These weapons fly two and a half times faster than U.S. ones. American cruise missiles are subsonic, but Russian-made ones can fly at well over Mach 2, or more than twice the speed of sound -- with speeds estimated at 1,500 mph to 1,700 mph at close to ground level.

Russia has sold the technology to build the Moskit to China, which manufactures it as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2. It can carry an almost 500-pound warhead, and it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon. The threat of the Hai Ying is so great that it has effectively barred operational access to the Taiwan Strait to U.S. aircraft carriers in time of high tension. China has also supplied the Hai Ying to Iran.

It is striking that four-star Adm. William Fox Fallon, who has just resigned as head of U.S. Central Command, has expressed his caution and reluctance about going to war with Iran. Fallon is the U.S. Navy's leading expert, and therefore probably the top authority in the world, about using aircraft carrier-based air power to strike land-based targets. His previous position was running Pacific Command with great distinction, and that theater includes China and Taiwan.

Fallon's caution is clearly based in part on the fact that U.S. carrier battle groups would have to be operated with great discretion and skill to protect them from the threat of Iran's Sunburns.

The threat that the Moskit SS-N-22 Sunburn -- and now its younger more advanced sister, the SS-N-27 Sizzler -- pose to U.S. aircraft carriers is very similar to the one that German battleships' 15-inch, or 381mm, plunging shell-fire fired from long range posed to British battlecruisers in World War II. The Bismarck, as previously noted in this series, sank the legendary and enormous, but only lightly armored, HMS Hood with a single long-range shell that detonated its powder magazine.

Respected analyst David Crane, writing in Defense Review in November 2006, concluded bleakly, "Bottom line, our aircraft carriers are vulnerable against the latest Russian and Chinese torpedo and missile tech, and with the current U.S. naval defense philosophy, that situation isn't likely to change anytime soon."

It is difficult to disagree with this prognosis.

CHINA AND INDIA SHADOW-BOXING IN BURMA

Burmese Squeeze

By TARUN KHANNA
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
April 10, 2008

An excellent piece on the competition between India and China over influence in Burma, India's neighbor, a gateway into SE Asia, a possible route for Persian Gulf oil and gas. For us, a reminder that there are other players in the world besides the U.S. Our failure to react to the destruction of the Soviet Union in any way other than to celebrate our "victory" played a significant role in the events leading up to 9/11, including our abruptly abandoning Pakistan and Afghanistan after spending a decade arming them to the teeth. Clinton's policies you will recall amounted to shooting a few missiles into the moutains. Bush still worse.
We need a new national security doctrine. I am going to post some thoughts on the issues involved in the coming weeks. This article is a warm-up. I will post more.

THE WIND IS FINALLY ARRIVING AT LANGLEY

Could it be that the fiasco of the recent NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program has ripped the scab off of Langley? McCain has talked about creating a new agency, stripped of the huge analytical apparatus feeding on itself, starved of real intelligence for decades.
I post David Ignatius' column without comment because it is clear, direct and does not need any gloss. Comments anyone?

What's Wrong at the CIA - David Ignatius, Washington Post

53 million gallons in danger of leaking

seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/355924_hanford21.html

The most vulnerable point in the United States is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation situated on the banks of the Columbia River. This remnant of the Manhattan Project has hundreds of buried concrete-encased steel tanks filled with radioactive brews that are often too hot and volatile to even analyze. Billions have been spent and squandered while the government has failed to contain the leakage from these tanks. Palliative measures may have prevented leakage into the river but it can and may happen.
The cleanup of Hanford is my sole measure of the environmental concern of each Administration. They have all failed. CarterReaganClintonBushBush. All Failures. Al Gore did nothing. Hot Air. A single bomb dropped anywhere in the reservation would destroy the Columbia River, radioactivate Oregon, Washington and a good piece of the North Pacific. The cleanup of Hanford requires, yes, you got it, a Manhattan Project. It should be THE environmental concern of the next Administration. It should be an issue in every campaign, but it never is. Why? No politician wants to rock the boat. They are happy to get a few billion to pay off the engineering and construction firms who get the contracts which fail to accomplish what is promised. THIS IS A WORLD CLASS DANGER. IT REQUIRES A CABINET OFFICER ASSIGNED FULLTIME.
For more than twenty years the threat and dangers of Hanford have been acknowledged. A lot of money has been spent, some of the most imminent threats have been relieved. The cleanup date for Hanford has now slipped to 2050. This is my measure of how deeply flawed our governance is.
Every time you hear global warming, think how near is the warming of the Columbia River gorge. Some problems are so large government simply ignores them. We are smug about the falling rate of longevity in Russia, largely due to alcoholism and environmental damages inflicted by the mishandling of their nuclear, chemical and other heavy metal industries. It may be irreversible. We have no reason to be smug. A third of the western United States and Canada are threatened too. We dither and risk disaster, intentionally inflicted or caused by our casual arrogance.
CLEAN UP HANFORD

THE AIR FORCE IS BOMBING THE NAVY

Among the several leitmotifs that have disfigured the half-hearted engagement of our people and leadership in debating the Iraq War, which has made it look like crass adventurism, has been the role of private contractors fulfilling formerly military -- sovereign -- roles. To describe this as outsourcing has always troubled me because of the issue of sovereignty. A computer contract is one thing, taking life is entirely different.
The following item is from Strategy Page. Simply put, the Navy has created a private company to do its aerial refueling which delivers the goods at a third the price the Air Force charges. I do not know whether the Air Force treats the Navy as a private client and gouges it (possibly) but the numbers in this article suggest something is terribly amiss in the Pentagon and the Air Force. This comes in the wake of a controversy surrounding the competition to build a new tanker which was delayed for years when Sen. McCain and others disclosed there was material and major corruption between Boeing and the Pentagon in the air tanker program. The old contract was scrapped, a few people went to jail, Boeing got new management and did not win the rebidded contract.
Eisenhower warned us in 1961 and we ignored the warning. We have seen in the mismangement of this war very disturbing evidence of incompetence and corruption. I am sure it is a scintilla of what is out there. Now if we had won in a cakewalk, whatever that could possibly mean, nobody would pay attention. But we have certainly not and this provides us the opportunity for a long overdue review. We can expect nothing from Congress which is the Pentagon's sole domestic client. And whether we stay in Iraq or withdraw rapidly, we still have vast forces overseen by the Pentagon, outdated and obscure national security doctrines, and a foreign policy that looks to the past. We need to explode a half century of covert relationships between Congress, the Pentagon and the Defense Establishment.
We need a comprehensive National Security policy which supports a foreign policy supported by the American people. We need a procurement and manpower policy that supports the doctrines we adopt. I am sure we need to close the Pentagon but that is another discussion. If the profiteering from fuel is applied to food, can you imagine what we are paying so our troops in Iraq have a good selection of ice cream for lunch? The implications of this are mind-boggling.

Privatizing Aerial Refueling

March 20, 2008: Now we have private contractors providing in-flight refueling services. Their biggest customer is the U.S. Navy. That's because the navy has long depended on the U.S. Air Force for most of its aerial refueling needs. But the air force tankers are so heavily used with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the navy often finds itself at the end of the line and out of luck. The navy has long improvised, using C-130s, S-3s and even F-18s to provide some in-flight refueling capability. But nothing beats the air force KC-135s. So the navy helped (with refueling contracts) establish a private aerial refueling outfit.

Omega Refueling Services, Inc., was established last year, and currently has two Boeing 707s (the civilian airliner version of the KC-135) and one DC-10 operating as aerial tankers. Congress went along with this deal because Omega delivered fuel more cheaply than the air force. Currently, it costs the air force about $17.50 per gallon to deliver fuel in the air. Omega can do this for $7 a gallon. Noting this, Congress ordered the air force to establish a pilot program, to see if this kind of service would work for the air force. The air force is not too enthusiastic about this.

On paper, Omega should work on a large scale. Most of the aerial refueling takes place outside of combat zones. The air force objects because of qualms about being able to order contractor refueling aircraft to a combat zone. That's an official qualm. Unofficial objections have more to do with losing aircraft and people in uniform to private firms. Those numbers are one of the ways you keep score in the Pentagon. Historically, armies and navies have been outsourcing logistical functions for thousands of years, and even some combat functions as well. The air force knows this, but fears that the contractors will demonstrate a cheaper way to run parts of the air force, bringing into doubt the quality of current and past air force leadership. Of course, Omega has another advantage it's military customers don't have, it can provide its services to anyone, and does. Although the navy gets dibs.

The National Treasury Party

March 14, 2008

Mississippi plaintiffs attorney Richard "Dickie" Scruggs pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy in a judicial bribery case. The surprise plea came during a hearing on pretrial matters. His trial was set to begin at the end of the month. Scruggs and co-defendant Sidney Backstrom both pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a judge. Scruggs's son, Zach, also is charged in the case but hasn't entered a plea. --from the Wall Street Journal
This is the latest fruit of the Republican Contract with America. Scrugg's is Trent Lott's brother in law. Now you know why Trent resigned and registered as a lobbyist.
There are no doubt some differences between bribes and earmarks but you have to be a particle physicist to distinguish them. Five terms of Southern Presidents has brought us a level of corruption that is staggering even by American standards. Clinton moderated its worst effects but once the Republicans controlled both branches, it was bombs away. It was the same when the Democrats controlled it all in 1964. We are confronting a profound constitutional challenge: our institutions are not functioning. There is no congressional oversight. There is little management of government by the Administration, and not just the incompetent lugheads currently in residence. Homeland Security and the border issues are just two examples. It would help some if several hundred congresspeople, including Lott went to the can, but it is not the solution. All thoughts welcome

If you believe the Democrats may have some answers, please read Charles Krauthammer's succinct and brilliant sketch of identity demagoguery by Hill and Obama. Punditry does not get better than this.

Adventures In Identity Politics - Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

Our political crisis has been developing since the Kennedy years. It is certainly accelerating now. Having "reformed" the Congress and the parties to assure that there is no backroom influence, politics has been reduced to personalities -- that is simply demagoguery. We can blame TV for this, we can blame many things but the elimination of "party interests" and the substitution of rules -- campaign finance, fairness etc-- has dramatically increased corruption, turned Congress into a brainless maw and made political campaigning permanent and indistinguishable from government and governing.

Our enemies should relax and let us continue to do ourselves in. They cannot do nearly as well as we are. We now have a one party system, The National Treasury Party whose factions squabble over their places at the trough.


March 14, 2008

Mississippi plaintiffs attorney Richard "Dickie" Scruggs pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy in a judicial bribery case. The surprise plea came during a hearing on pretrial matters. His trial was set to begin at the end of the month. Scruggs and co-defendant Sidney Backstrom both pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a judge. Scruggs's son, Zach, also is charged in the case but hasn't entered a plea.

Holocaust Update

The following is from the current Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Update:


Jihadi Website Supplies Instructions for Anthrax Production

Much has been said about al-Qaeda’s quest to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a means of striking at the heart of their number one enemy, the United States. The latest example of these ongoing efforts to acquire WMD capabilities is a recent posting in a jihadi internet forum entitled: “Good News – Anthrax Production Technique” (al-ekhlaas.net, March 3).

A forum participant, nicknamed al-Faz, posted a detailed description of anthrax production techniques dedicated to jihadis everywhere: “Long awaited good news for you, God’s soldiers. It’s time to use biological weapons against God’s enemies.” Al-Faz commences his posting with an introduction to anthrax and the pathology of the disease, including symptoms, parts of human body infected when exposed to anthrax and fatality percentages. Al-Faz notes that anthrax bacteria can be found in Africa, Asia and in some parts of Europe where the soil contains 10 anthrax bacteria per gram.

According to the jihadi forum, the following factors make anthrax the weapon of choice:

• Anthrax is powerful, lethal, cheap and easy to prepare.
• 50 grams of anthrax, when dispersed in a 2-kilometer line, forms a deadly cloud that can cover 20 kilometers.
• One kilogram of anthrax can be produced in a small laboratory in 96 hours.
• Anthrax bacteria spores are available worldwide and can be easily extracted.
• Production costs are low; one kilogram of anthrax bacteria costs about $50 even though a lethal dose can be as little as one millionth of a gram.
• Colorless and odorless anthrax is easily concealed.
• Anthrax is a stable and dry substance that can be easily transported and used.

Before proceeding to anthrax production, al-Faz includes in his posting a picture of one of the anthrax-contaminated letters used in the 2001 U.S. anthrax attacks that killed five and infected 17 others. Undoubtedly included in an effort to encourage jihadis to try anthrax as a weapon, the letter reads: “You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” The photo of the letter in no way establishes a jihadi connection to the still unsolved anthrax attacks—it is one of several released by the FBI and is easily available on the internet. Nevertheless, anthrax continues to be a feared weapon—only last week an Albany, Oregon courthouse was closed and the National Guard called in to deal with threats of anthrax contamination, which later proved to be a hoax (Albany Democrat Herald, March 4).

The second part of al-Faz’s posting elaborates on two methods of anthrax production. Photos are included of the microscopic phases of the process, including the extraction of anthrax bacteria from a sample of dirt that contains the infected remains of dead goats or other grazing animals’ remnants. A sample of a dead animal’s blood or tissue can also be used by cultivating it in a blood agar substance containing 0.7% sodium bicarbonate.

The attached pictures illustrate bacilli bacteria, spirochetes and bacteria clusters. The posting further includes precautionary instructions for the different phases of production. “Agar is a nutrient environment for cultivation that can be bought without drawing any suspicions from research centers for 70 Riyals or $20 per one kilogram,” says al-Faz.

The second method of producing anthrax involves cultivating the anthrax in horse blood and bentonite clay for five hours. Bentonite clay, an absorbent form of clay with multiple industrial uses, can be found in Iraq and two other countries in the region.

In conclusion, al-Faz says, “I wanted to contribute in the preparations against enemies of God. Consider me the servant of the mujahideen. I closely follow your news. May God reward you for your sacrifices. It would make me very happy to see you use biological weapons against God’s enemies. Wait for my next detailed posting on how to build a Cessna 128 aircraft,” which is an easily maintained agricultural aircraft designed to carry and spread a chemical load of 200 to 280 gallons.

Although there is no tangible evidence to confirm that jihadis have produced or procured mass quantities of biological weapons, the use of anthrax spores in bioterrorism has been discussed by jihadis for some time now. In theory, at least, cultivating anthrax spores can be achieved with minimum know-how and equipment, suggesting it is only a matter of time until jihadis succeed in producing some kind of biological weapon. There are, however, many dangers involved in the process and the development of a weaponized aerosol version of the bacterium requires scientific skills and equipment unavailable to most jihadis.

Abdul Hameed Bakier is an intelligence expert on counter-terrorism, crisis management and terrorist-hostage negotiations. He is based in Jordan.
I post this simply to remind you of a simple reality: there are people out there who dream of killing all of us (you and me). We are not going to change their minds for the most part. But we can dissuade them from acting out their desires. Do we really have a choice?

ARMED ROBBERY FOLLOWED BY MURDER

"The Belgian government and banks agreed on Tuesday to pay $170 million to Holocaust survivors, families of victims and the Jewish community for their material losses during Word War II."-- Associated Press

This announcement by the Belgium government is a timely reminder of what we are really talking about when the Holocaust is mentioned. The word itself has taken on a sacred meaning, requiring its withdrawal from everyday life. I was rereading recently President Eisenhower's farewell speech, famous for its comments about the military-industrial complex. He mentions several great wars in which the United States participated, referring to them as "holocausts", plural. The word can no longer be employed this way without risking a claim that the speaker is an antiseminte, discounting the fate of Europe's Jews at the hands of Hitler, Himmler, their legions of German killers, and still larger legions of European collaborators.

The Holocaust is reserved specifically for Jews. Which is why when a few people are killed in Gaza the Arab propaganda machine goes into overdrive to speak of the "real holocaust", you know the one perpetrated by the Jews, who are of course the Nazis, against the innocent people of Gaza, who have been robbed of their homes and their identity. As you may know it is particularly important for these Arabs to get this focus correct because the current President of Iran has encouraged their hopes by declaring his intention to soon rid the world of Israel. Sometimes he mentions sending the people back to Europe, sometimes he refers to them as bacteria who will be cleansed. You get the idea -- they will disappear. Is it possible to have the Holocaust twice? This is going to pose some very real linguistic problems. But before addressing these, I would like to clear up some confusion about the first one.

The murdered Jews of Europe died within the context of a world war. Millions of others died as well, many millions more than they. Which is why Hitler was able to carry out his plans. This is not the place to review the development of his policies which culminated in the gassing gulags in Poland. Suffice it to say that he announced his intention of killing the Jews with gas in Mein Kampf which he published in 1923. This was the vision he came out of the war with and its realization is his enduring legacy, along with ending a thousand year migration of German peoples into the eastern marches.

The fixation of people on the methods of this murder -- bureaucratic thoroughness, tatooing, slave labor, starvation-- has created an image of the events which actually obscures something both simple and profound. As you know political antisemitism argued that the Jews ruthlessly controlled the world's wealth, using manipulation of capital, interest rates etc. to keep everyone else in thrall. It is endlessly pointed out that most Jewish victims were simple people from eastern Europe who were not well off. This is emphasized repeatedly by well-meaning people seeking to rebut the antisemitic canard about Jews controlling the world's wealth. Sadly, it is not possible to rebut a lie with facts, but it is possible to obscure simple truths.

Every victim who was murdered by the German Nazis and their European collaborators was a person who lived somewhere. He was a person who had a family, he had a house, he owned shoes, clothes, pots and pans,had some books, maybe a bicycle, some photos -- you know he was a person like yourself, had a life, possessions etc. What you need to remember is that before each one of them was murdered, they were ROBBED.

The Holocaust may or may not be unique, but armed robbery followed by murder is a very well known category of crime. Indeed, it is the category of crime which arouses the most immediate demands for harsh police action. As it should. If you can allow yourself to think of these people as five or six million INDIVIDUALS who first were robbed and then murdered, often with quite a bit of sport and degradation in between, including raping most of the women, experimenting on lots of them etc., then you will be able to better understand some of the developments in Europe since 1945.

Let me mention several of the most important. 1. ABOLITION OF THE DEATH PENALTY Collusion with the Nazis was so widespread, stolen real estate and other wealth was so widely spread among the leading citizens of many localities, there was a strong interest in limiting the punishment that might be inflicted on collaborators. The first thing to be outlawed was the death penalty after a few show trials. 2. REPARATIONS In the last few years some museums have had to cough up several paintings which were looted, but rest assured nobody asked the national banks to give back the gold fillings that were ripped from the helpless mouths of hundreds of thousands of people. You see what I mean by armed robbery followed by murder? People who moved into vacated apartments, drove looted cars, wore stolen shoes were never asked to return these. A collective responsibility freed all individuals of any responsibility. 3. DECAY OF RELIGION. If Hitler had defeated Russia, I have no doubt he would have initiated a new State Religion. Upon his death he would have been deified. The collusion of the Roman Catholic Church with the Nazis in Croatia and elsewhere, the widespread support of clerics in many countries and many denominations, profoundly compromised these churches and left them gravely weakened in the aftermath of WW2. None of them have recovered their followings. The post-1945 generation of Europeans avoided all of the authorities that had supported and participated in the robbery, looting, and murder that characterized European life from the mid-1930s. National Socialism replaced nationalism and Christianity in Europe and National Socialism is the orthodoxy of the European Union.

I do not know what Arab propagandists say to Arabic speakers about the doings on Israel's borders. I do not recall much attention being given to the 4000 rockets shot into Israel by Hizbullah or the several thousand sent from Gaza. I do not doubt there is going to be quite a bit more shooting and killing, even real war. But mass murder of the kind perfected by the Europeans, that I do not see. We might even see ethnic cleansing of the kind that is currently working in Darfur and western Kenya, but not genocide, at least not from the Israeli side. Unless you think the use of nuclear weapons is inherently genocidal.

When you next hear talk of the Holocaust, I ask you to pause for a second and think, armed robbery followed by murder. You might also ask yourself what took Belgium sixty-three years.
Now for the contest. There is only one lesson to be learned from the Holocaust: IT WORKS. Having been demonstrated to work, it will be copied and improved upon. So in order to be prepared, can we have a name ready for it. You see how badly prepared we are from the response in Rwanda. Unnamed, it is already forgotten. The destruction of Liberia and the Congo are unnamed and unnoted. If you want to sell something, anything, you have to name it first. So, any suggestions for a universal, all-purpose name for the next BigOne are welcome.

A WONDERFUL GIFT IGNORED

I just watched Werner Herzog's film, RESCUE DAWN, based on a documentary he made a decade ago, LITTLE DIETER HAS TO FLY, the story of a German-American citizen, Navy flier, and test pilot, Dieter Dengler. Each is a remarkable, unique film imbued with the ferocity and intelligence inherent in Herzog's eye on human experience and nature.
RESCUE DAWN is made according to a classic Hollywood template -- the great escape. As an exemplar it is among the best ever made. This is the reason I expect it has been ignored. Because Dengler is a hero, who successfully escapes from North Vietnamese captivity in Laos, the critics may have assumed that this is a pro-war film, tacitly supporting the war in Iraq. This alone explains why the reviews are pallid. Too bad, because this film is first of all a wonderful adventure story -- Christian Bale gives an Oscar-worthy performance as do several of the supporting actors. It offers an unvarnished look at men at war. And most important, it provides us with a profoundly empathic view of what torture is, how it affects people in different ways, and what it makes people do and not do.
I do not presume to know what is going on in Werner Herzog's mind. I do not know what are his political views. Nor do I know how anyone could support how President Bush has conducted American foreign and security policy since September 11, 2001. As far as I can tell the Iraq War has been America's exit strategy from Central Europe. Not more and not less. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our national security doctrine lost its rationale. President Clinton cut the military by four divisions but kept all of the weapons programs in place, as if nothing had changed. No review was undertaken. Clinton ignored the 1993 bombing of the WTC and both Clinton and Bush ignored persistent warnings about plane hijackings which have been a feature of global terrorism since the 1970s. 9/11 revealed that our national security administration is braindead. Despite a national commission investigating the events of that day which transformed the world, we are still in the dark about who knew what and who did what. The Commission concluded that EVERYONE was responsible, thus exonerating all.
Werner Herzog uses RESCUE DAWN to comment slyly and with an unblinking eye at the underlying realities which are ignored in the hysterical and hypocritical harangues that pass for debate now. Here are some facts. Dieter Dengler is sent on a bombing mission into Laos, a country which is at peace with the U.S. He is to bomb supply routes used by the North Vietnamese to supply their fighters in South Vietnam. His mission is secret and illegal. His phosphorous bombs are dropped on villages indiscriminately. Who is a civilian, who is a combatant? Dengler is captured and imprisoned with several other American and allied combatants who are routinely tormented, starved, beaten and threatened. Dengler refuses to sign a statement condemning his actions and the U.S. which would have spared him. Among other things we see a version of water-boarding. If you doubt this is torture, take a look. But that is not the point. Everything Dengler and his fellow prisoners experience is torture. They are living under the threat of execution. Their existence is denied by the United States! From the first day Dengler is determined to escape because he is a warrior, surrender is not in his nature. He finally convinces the others to support him when they learn that the guards have decided to kill them all so they can return to their home villages in search of food. They are not quite as hungry as the Americans, but they are hungry.
The prisoners are from one point of view, war criminals. They have killed civilians in an undeclared war. They have. Are they terrorists? Are they Capitalist Pigdog Lackeys? They are all of these things to someone. But they are first of all young men trying to survive. It is a commonplace of the nondebate about our policy that everyone supports the troops. Well, maybe the best way to support the troops is to understand why they are doing what they are doing. In this film, Herzog shows us: they are trying to stay alive. There are three Americans, each has a different strategy. One wants to make nice to the enemy until he learns they plan to kill him. One wants to give up. They both die. One is determined to escape. He survives not because he is a hero but because he is fortunate. And his supreme efforts to survive make it possible for good fortune to occur. And that is it.
To me the most interesting question raised by this excellent film is why it has been ignored. Everything in it is human. There are no special effects. There are no tricks. There are just people operating from human motives, doing things that humans at war have been doing for millenia. Millions trudge to see movies about Romans, Spartans, Space Invaders, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, but given a chance to see a film about the boys next door -- they stay away in droves. If you really care about the troops, if you really support them, it is IMPERATIVE to understand what they are being asked to do in our name. We seem to not really care which is why we are wasting our national treasure and our youth on inexplicable follies like the Battle of Falujah and the Bombing of Laos.
We need desperately to have a real debate on national security. We need a policy from which we can craft a national defense budget that is not just subsidies for congressional districts. And we need it soon or we are going to be the Sole Superpower whose only card will be nuclear weapons and a Security Council veto. And we will have defeated ourselves, just like the New England Patriots.

A VALUABLE WEBSITE

Global Guerrillas

OF RATS AND SUPEREMPOWERMENT

Posted: 04 Mar 2008 08:59 PM CST

Here's a big think brief to get your mind working:

Artificial intelligence is not made from scratch in a lab, rather, it's a bootstrap that leverages what has already been developed in the biological world. Existing, biological intelligence is first modeled and then replicated in hardware/software combos (as we see in the picture to the right, where the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne has produced a model of the upper levels of a rat's brain). This process of development gets really interesting when we exceed the computational equivalence of different strata of biological intelligence within the confines of an inexpensive, standard commercial chip. We recently passed the level of intelligence seen with insects, and the knock-on effects have been a plethora of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) drones, robots, and intelligent software agents. It will get even more interesting we pass to a mammal's level of intelligence, for example the rat, over the next few years.

Over the next decade, the growth rate of artificial intelligence will have the following impacts on warfare (there's LOTS more, but I'll leave that for my next book if I can find a way to make it financially worth while to write):

• Ubiquity. As the cost of an insects level of intelligence drops to a pittance (less than 5 years), it will make its way into almost every product imaginable. In a fashion similar to a queen bee, every person will own thousands of tiny workers that can do a myriad of tasks (many through the miracle of self-replication via software). For the Hamas guerrilla firing a low cost rocket into Israel, the cost of adding a guidance system that allows it to hit a specific window or electricity substation becomes trivial. For the RBN computer hacker, each "bot" in his swarm will be able to run rule sets that will make today's Storm network look trivially simple in comparison.
• Speed. The rate at which artificial intelligence will be made available to the average global consumer isn't a straight line. It's exponential (see Kurzweil's inset graph). This means that governments and corporations will quickly find that the delta between what is only possible in a lab and what is available in the mass market will shrink. In time, particularly for the government given its slow process of adoption, these organizations will find it's less about getting ahead of the technology curve, but rather keeping up. This lag will be exacerbated by the way in which tinkering networks of amateur inventors sprawl over the technology and apply these capabilities into new niches much faster than bigger organizations.
• Power. The improvement in the intelligence available to the individual will quickly reach a mammal's level (ie. rat) in a few years and human level equivalents by the end of the next decade. Shortly after that, as the cost of such capabilities reaches pennies, it's likely that vast majority (99.9999%) of intelligent users of the Internet will be some form artificial intelligence and not biological beings. The same level of saturation will be true for nearly every physical object we make, buy and sell. At that point, things will get really interesting.

A CLARION CALL

www.usawakeup.org

I do not endorse every frame of the video but you should watch it. We are threatened by people who are our allies. We have permitted the Saudis to use the wealth we have given them to corrupt our Congress, our universities and a good part of our press. The U.S. allowed the Wahabis to train and select the Muslim clerics who minister in our Federal prisons. This has been going on for thirty years. We became arrogant and complacent. I will always wonder why Bin Laden authorized the attack because we were asleep at the wheel. We still are, but the United States is beginning to stumble into awareness. We are as a people becoming aware that our government is incompetent and not fit to lead us. We are still lost, still wedded to these two parties that are really wings of what I call the Treasury Party. Recovering our path, reducing our dependence on Washington will not be easy. Indeed, it may fail. We see they will not even secure our borders. They will in fact do nothing unless we find ways to force them to act. You might well ask, Who are WE? I really do not know. This blog is one small effort to reach out to like minded people, to find ways to connect, to assure ourselves we are not alone or loony, to find ways to act in concert to revive old time values, civility, decency, capable government, modest and focused. We have to stop living in the past, on our glory. We need new people in government, we need to close half of the government down (fat chance), we need to end farm subsidies that have produced a tidal wave of corn syrup which has poisoned our food. Watch this video, monitor your reactions. Are you fearful? Do you want to do something? What could it be? Tell me. Tell your friends.

Michael J Totten

http://www.michaeltotten.com/ There is another wonderful post from the Portland, OR. based writer visiting with the Marines in Fallujah. Along with the better known and more experienced Michael Yon, these two young men are carrying on the tradition of the lamented Michael Kelly, editor of the Atlantic, who died, by drowning, covering the assault on Baghdad. They are writing from the front. They are reporting on the American soldier and marine, how they live and fight and persevere, and yes die, even though the numbers are small. These two men are very well worth reading and supporting financially.

chavez is not wasting a minute

In the runup to Fidel's retirement, "President" Chavez has not wasted a minute to push himself to the front. Stung by an election defeat -- that is not likely to happen again--he has threatened war with Colombia, while getting his FARC allies to hand over to him a few of their hostages so he can magnanimously release them. Colombia has struck back, killing a leading FARC commander and allegedly seizing his computer.
And what does it contain? According to Colombian authorities this --

Colombia Files Show Chavez Funded FARC, Rebels Sought Uranium

By Helen Murphy

March 3 (Bloomberg) -- Colombia's police chief Oscar Naranjo said documents from the computer of a guerrilla leader killed last weekend in Ecuador show links to Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.

The documents on the computer of Raul Reyes, the second in command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, indicate that Venezuela provided the guerrillas with at least $300 million and would help Chavez in the event of a U.S. attack on Venezuela.

Naranjo said the FARC, as the group is known, was seeking to buy 50 kilos of uranium for bomb making with aim of getting involved in international terrorism.

To contact the reporter on this story: Helen Murphy in Bogota at Hmurphy1@bloomberg.net .

It may or may not be true but what is certain is that Chavez, a Trotskyite believer in permanent revolution, is going to become more and more extreme, quickly. He is in deep trouble at home. His only path is to continue doubling. Obama, if he is elected may have his first talk with Chavez. Good luck. What is more important and troubling is the report about the uranium. I doubt the reporter is correct about this. It is plutonium or something else radioactive they are looking for. It reminds me again of what is undoubtedly the greatest danger we face: a dirty bomb or a suitcase device dropped from a small plane. Chavez is just the kind of pompous madman who would be happy to promote this. Along with his friend in Teheran.

ISRAEL AND GAZA

As we enter the seventh decade of the struggle between Israel and the refugees of Palestine, who are allied with their brothers, the non-refugees of Palestine, who live in the West Bank under Israeli military scrutiny and colonization, while another very large group of Palestinians watch quietly, as citizens of Israel who are holding their breath in fear they may have to one day live under Arab rule and lose everything they have achieved since 1948, the world continues to condemn Israel for causing civilian casualties. As we are approaching real war that may shortly involve Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and yes the Palestinians, refugees, occupied and suppressed (but armed) West Bankers, apprehensive and fearful Israeli Arabs, both Muslim and Christian whose numbers have been vastly diminished by emigration compelled from fear of Islamic extremism which has reduced Arab Christian populations in the Middle East by 2/3s in the past century, the vexed question of who is civilian and who is not will become more prominent. Outside of Israel I do not hear many voices condemning the bombardment of Israeli towns by rocketing, nor was there much objection to Hizbullah shooting 4000 rockets into Israel, many filled with ballbearings. As an introduction to this topic I offer the following post from an Australian blogger on site who is having difficulty identifying who is a civilian in Gaza. Personally, I doubt if there is one until he or she becomes a casualty. Not that they are all fighters, they are not. Many of them are bystanders with nowhere to go and nobody to protect them from violence if they express any objection to Hamas or any of the other gangs.

Liveblogging the Conflict: Sat/Sun Feb 29-Mar 1

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Aussie Dave

The IDF launched it’s Gaza military operation last night, with 2 IDF soldiers killed and 5 wounded until now. The fighting has been fierce, with IDF soldiers being met with heavy gunfire from palestinian gunmen (mainly from Hamas), who used rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles against the troops. IAF planes have been providing air support for the troops, launching missiles at the terrorists during the fighting. One soldier was killed when a terrorist threw an explosive device towards him, and the second soldier was killed during a gun battle.

43-47 palestinians have reportedly also been killed, which, according to palestinian sources, includes civilians. According to Ynetnews, most of the terrorists killed were from Hamas, but also included members of Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees. It is truly a united effort to bring Israel to her knees.

As usual, I am finding it difficult to find a consistent number of palestinian civilians killed. From the Israeli news sites, Ha’aretz reports 10 civilians, Ynetnews 12 (based on a lower figure of 43 palestinians killed), and JPost 16. From the palestinian sites, Ramattan reports 45 dead, the majority of which were civilians. While I do not doubt civilians have been killed, remember we are at war here. Also remember the Hamas quote I blogged yesterday:

“We will not play into Israel’s hands. If and when the operation is launched, we will combat it with no more than 20 percent of our manpower. The remaining 80 percent will wait for the Israelis inside Palestinian territory to fight under the conditions that we are familiar with and to show that are forces are still there..”

The terrorists are operating within civilian areas, many times with the actual assistance of these civilians, and more often than not with their tacit approval. Brace yourselves for the palestinian propaganda offensive going into overdrive, including stories about civilian deaths, many of which may not be true. Here is an example:

Earlier Friday night, the Palestinians reported of four people killed in IDF strikes in the Strip, including a one-year-old baby. However, there were conflicting versions over the circumstances of the child’s death.

At first, the Palestinians accused the IDF of attacking the baby’s house, but later reported that the house was hit by a stray rocket fired by the Palestinians from within Gaza.

Also brace yourselves for “Israel-Nazi” comparisons. Already today, both PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal have compared Israel’s defending herself to the holocaust. In fact, Abbas said our military campaign is “is more than a Holocaust,” which disappoints me since he is somewhat of an expert on the subject.

Meanwhile, another 5 Israelis were wounded in two separate strikes on Ashkelon, with terrorists launching approximately 50 rockets at southern Israel over the course of the day.

Don’t make any mistake about it. We are at war (and have been for a while now).

I will, as usual, endeavor to liveblog the conflict as it ensues.

I have no idea who Aussie Dave is. He might be a creation of Israeli propaganda. I doubt it since Israeli PR is among the world's worst, but he is expressing my view that the debate created in the world press is largely a construct. This conflict is going to become very nasty, far beyond its normal level of terrible, vile and persistent.

INTRODUCING COACH AMERICA

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a cooperative adventure, a conversation about America, where it is and where it is heading.
I am a historian, ethnographer and Life Coach by training, not a strategist, economist or political scientist. But politics, economics, and national strategy will figure prominently in these pages. In an earlier part of my life I spent several years with the Philadelphia Police Department as a patrol officer. Based on that work I published a study of patrol work, City Police, which James Q. Wilson described as a "landmark study". The years I spent on the streets of Philadelphia with the good, the ordinary and the very, very bad changed my life and my views of academic study. I learned first of all that there is very little that is true or worthwhile reading in newspapers. And it has only gotten much worse in the intervening thirty years. I also learned that most of what passes for intellectual study of our political and social life in universities is political propaganda and special pleading which is best read for its intellectual content and then ignored, if you really want to know what is going on.
Following on my study of police, I wanted to study the illegal drug trades. I knew some people from college who had become successful "farmers" in Colombia. Several conversations and discussions convinced me that an effort to duplicate City Police with City Dealer would have resulted in martyrdom. Instead, I went to work as a liquor salesman for the mob in New York. For the next dozen years I studied a variety of rackets all of which touched on political and regulatory corruption. And much worse. I have little doubt that there are few in Congress who could not be successfully prosecuted and sentenced to jail. They should be and they will not be. Too bad.
What then is to be done? Well, for starters you need an open mind, a willingness to listen and share, and the courage to express a point of view. This is politics, this is life, it is not science. And science by the way is a rigorous process which is constantly amending error by the discovery of new, verifiable evidence. All truth is not relative, but a good deal of what is really true, like gravity for instance, is constantly being refined, redefined, restated. And there is nothing in politics that even begins to approach gravity, except death and taxes of course.
I am neither a Republican or a Democrat although as a child of Jewish refugees from Hitler, I grew up with the New Deal. In the 8th grade I had Stevenson trouncing Eisenhower, was distraught when he lost. I am now a great admirer of Ike and wish he was President in place of everyone who has been in the office since 1960.
I am profoundly unhappy with both political parties. I believe we need a new Federalist party that will restore some balance to our political system. We are the victims of our own success and triumphs. The United States is a martial country. It was born out of world war -- The Seven Years War -- between European powers slobbering over declining Spain's wealth and treasure, and Revolution. Its leaders were all men versed in the arts of war and its spoils. They were realists but they were also men who prized liberty. This is important to remember since most of them, indeed all of them, profited from slavery or lived entirely off the profits that the slave economy produced. Thomas Jefferson could have earned a living as a lawyer; he chose to be a gentleman with 400 slaves. They recognized it for the evil it is and worked to end it in a way that did not penalize them. Well, they failed and managed to create the conditions that destroyed the Anglo-Saxon Republic they made. Hundreds of thousands of young men never had the chance to create families and descendants. From my point of view this is good because without their deaths and the upheavals the Civil War spawned, the United States would not have become a country that offered shelter to millions fleeing oppression and even death, as in the case of my family.
There is a view that argues America was born at Valley Forge. The U.S. Army is said to be the first institution that embodied the national sentiment. This sentiment was only gradually extended to other parts of our society. There were many people in America indifferent to the burning of the White House by the British in the War of 1812. But the federal army was always small, small enough to be no threat to any of the States. When war appeared on the horizon, the States supplied levies to the federal authority. At the end of each war, there was demobilization. The real power of America was its Navy, permanent, completely Federal. The U.S. fought in 1812, 1847, 1861, 1898, 1917 and 1942. At the end of each of these wars the nation demobilized. In 1865 we had an army that could have conquered Canada, Mexico and beyond; instead we demobilized. In 1946 President Truman began the process of demobilization which was interrupted by a decision to oppose Soviet expansion into Greece and beyond. The reality is the existence of nuclear weapons changed the nature of warfare forever and the growth of airpower changed forever our separation from overseas threats. Even if we had continued to demobilize, Executive Authority would have continued to grow. The vast military forces we sustained however, dramatically increased Executive authority and diluted Congressional power. This is all well known. As is the rise of Judicial power to offset the weakening of Congress. Whatever the Judiciary has contributed, we remain a country whose political institutions do not work particularly well.
Executive Authority is vast, Congressional review and vigilance is weak and undirected. The States have little independent authority and the courts have taken from them a good deal of what was left to them after the innovative years of the New Deal. We have been transformed from a Republic into a Democracy with few institutions that really function to check the vast Executive authority. Electioneering is now permanent and increasingly suspect. The country is filled with rotten boros. We can debate which is worse -- St. Louis, Detroit, Florida -- but there is the widespread sense something really stinks. Election corruption is inherent in the system and has always been present, but today it threatens to compromise the system itself. This is a grave danger. I fail to understand why we do not use the paper ballot. It is the only truly safe and totally controllable system.
There are many places where this discussion could begin. I have opened with a brief personal review of our institutions. I have emphasized national security instead of tax and tariff policies because we are enmeshed in a war that has caused deep dissent and revealed a remarkable lack of candor and preparation by our government. I still have no idea what is our policy in Iraq and have no idea why we are in Afghanistan other than to find and kill Osama bin Laden for murdering 3,000 Americans on a sunny morning in September in New York City and who would have murdered 300,000 or 3,000,000 if he could have. And after eight years we are still failing. That is a good reason to be really upset. We have vast military power and no national consensus on what it is for. This is unacceptable.
I am going to write a second post in a few days discussing my views of what are the elements of a national security policy and what is required to create one. We need one desperately. I will tell you one element now: Abolish the Pentagon and give the building to the Smithsonian. Abolish the CIA, turn its research over to the Library of Congress and create an entirely new instititution modeled on the OSS devoted to developing human intelligence in the Islamic and Chinese spheres.