The Past, End­lessly Repeat­ing: This Is What They Want. Many of you have prob­a­bly already read the lat­est Sey­mour Hersh: “Prepar­ing the Bat­tle­field: The Bush admin­is­tra­tion steps up its secret moves against Iran.” Inter­est­ing read­ing, in con­junc­tion with this. I sup­pose “inter­est­ing” is one word for it.

I think we might dis­till the arti­cle down to a few key excerpts.

First:

Late last year, Con­gress agreed to a request from Pres­i­dent Bush to fund a major esca­la­tion of covert oper­a­tions against Iran, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer mil­i­tary, intel­li­gence, and con­gres­sional sources. These oper­a­tions, for which the Pres­i­dent sought up to four hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars, were described in a Pres­i­den­tial Find­ing signed by Bush, and are designed to desta­bi­lize the country’s reli­gious lead­er­ship. The covert activ­i­ties involve sup­port of the minor­ity Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dis­si­dent orga­ni­za­tions. They also include gath­er­ing intel­li­gence about Iran’s sus­pected nuclear-weapons program.

Clan­des­tine oper­a­tions against Iran are not new. United States Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Forces have been con­duct­ing cross-border oper­a­tions from south­ern Iraq, with Pres­i­den­tial autho­riza­tion, since last year. These have included seiz­ing mem­bers of Al Quds, the com­mando arm of the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard, and tak­ing them to Iraq for inter­ro­ga­tion, and the pur­suit of “high-value tar­gets” in the President’s war on ter­ror, who may be cap­tured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the oper­a­tions in Iran, which involve the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and the Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand (JSOC), have now been sig­nif­i­cantly expanded, accord­ing to the cur­rent and for­mer offi­cials. Many of these activ­i­ties are not spec­i­fied in the new Find­ing, and some con­gres­sional lead­ers have had seri­ous ques­tions about their nature.

…

Although some leg­is­la­tors were trou­bled by aspects of the Find­ing, and “there was a sig­nif­i­cant amount of high-level dis­cus­sion” about it, accord­ing to the source famil­iar with it, the fund­ing for the esca­la­tion was approved. In other words, some mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­tic leadership—Congress has been under Demo­c­ra­tic con­trol since the 2006 elections—were will­ing, in secret, to go along with the Admin­is­tra­tion in expand­ing covert activ­i­ties directed at Iran, while the Party’s pre­sump­tive can­di­date for Pres­i­dent, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

Next:

None of the four Democ­rats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee chair­man John D. Rock­e­feller IV, and House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee chair­man Sil­vestre Reyes—would com­ment on the Find­ing, with some not­ing that it was highly clas­si­fied. An aide to one mem­ber of the Demo­c­ra­tic lead­er­ship responded, on his behalf, by point­ing to the lim­i­ta­tions of the Gang of Eight process. The noti­fi­ca­tion of a Find­ing, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activ­i­ties. Proper over­sight of ongo­ing intel­li­gence activ­i­ties is done by fully brief­ing the mem­bers of the intel­li­gence com­mit­tee.” How­ever, Con­gress does have the means to chal­lenge the White House once it has been sent a Find­ing. It has the power to with­hold fund­ing for any gov­ern­ment oper­a­tion. The mem­bers of the House and Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­tic lead­er­ship who have access to the Find­ing can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared con­cerns, come up with ways to exert their influ­ence on Admin­is­tra­tion pol­icy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t com­ment one way or the other on alle­ga­tions of covert activ­i­ties or pur­ported find­ings.” The White House also declined to comment.)

A mem­ber of the House Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee acknowl­edged that, even with a Demo­c­ra­tic vic­tory in Novem­ber, “it will take another year before we get the intel­li­gence activ­i­ties under con­trol.” He went on, “We con­trol the money and they can’t do any­thing with­out the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Admin­is­tra­tion.” He added, “This Admin­is­tra­tion has been so secretive.”

Brave Democ­rats, with sig­nif­i­cant change in gov­ern­ment pol­icy always just over the hori­zon, when the light appears beyond the curve of the tun­nel after the moun­tain has been climbed, once a mul­ti­tude of uni­corns and ponies have appeared on every doorstep, after…oh, to hell with it. But cut­ting off money now, to stop the hor­rific progress of utterly insane actions…nope, don’t want to do that.

Beyond these points, none of this mat­ters in the least, first, because intel­li­gence is entirely irrel­e­vant with regard to the con­ven­tional argu­ments about its cen­tral impor­tance (read lies for “con­ven­tional argu­ments”), and sec­ond, because the Democ­rats favor, in fun­da­men­tal terms, the exactly iden­ti­cal for­eign pol­icy. Huz­zah!

Saved my favorite Hersh bit for last:

Many of the activ­i­ties may be being car­ried out by dis­si­dents in Iran, and not by Amer­i­cans in the field. One prob­lem with “pass­ing money” (to use the term of the per­son famil­iar with the Find­ing) in a covert set­ting is that it is hard to con­trol where the money goes and whom it ben­e­fits. Nonethe­less, the for­mer senior intel­li­gence offi­cial said, “We’ve got expo­sure, because of the trans­fer of our weapons and our com­mu­ni­ca­tions gear. The Ira­ni­ans will be able to make the argu­ment that the oppo­si­tion was inspired by the Amer­i­cans. How many times have we tried this with­out ask­ing the right ques­tions? Is the risk worth it?” One pos­si­ble con­se­quence of these oper­a­tions would be a vio­lent Iran­ian crack­down on one of the dis­si­dent groups, which could give the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion a rea­son to intervene.

…

The Admin­is­tra­tion may have been will­ing to rely on dis­si­dent orga­ni­za­tions in Iran even when there was rea­son to believe that the groups had oper­ated against Amer­i­can inter­ests in the past. The use of Baluchi ele­ments, for exam­ple, is prob­lem­atic, Robert Baer, a for­mer C.I.A. clan­des­tine offi­cer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Mid­dle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fun­da­men­tal­ists who hate the régime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shi­ite Ira­ni­ans. The irony is that we’re once again work­ing with Sunni fun­da­men­tal­ists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was con­victed for his role in the 1993 bomb­ing of the World Trade Cen­ter, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is con­sid­ered one of the lead­ing plan­ners of the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

Just like Afghanistan in the 1980s! Because that worked out so well.

Time to reprise some excerpts from Robert Dreyfuss’s Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam (I offered them once before, in the sec­ond half of “It’s Much Later than We Think: Why It Is Not ‘Our War’”).

I excerpted Dreyfuss’s obser­va­tions as a demon­stra­tion of a prin­ci­ple I iden­ti­fied sev­eral years ago, con­cern­ing “The Folly of Inter­ven­tion”:

Inter­ven­tion always leads to more inter­ven­tion: the first inter­ven­tion leads to unfore­seen and uncon­trol­lable con­se­quences, which are then used as the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for still fur­ther inter­ven­tion. That inter­ven­tion in turn leads to still more unfore­seen and uncon­trol­lable con­se­quences, which are then used as yet another jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for still fur­ther inter­ven­tion. The process can go on indef­i­nitely, and the ulti­mate con­se­quences are always dis­as­trous in the extreme.

Here is Drey­fuss:

There is an unwrit­ten chap­ter in the his­tory of the Cold War and the New World Order that fol­lowed. It is the story of how the United States–sometimes overtly, some­times covertly–funded and encour­aged right-wing Islamist activism. Devil’s Game attempts to fill in that vital miss­ing link.

Vital because this little-known pol­icy, con­ducted over six decades, is partly to blame for the emer­gence of Islamist ter­ror­ism as a world­wide phe­nom­e­non. Indeed, America’s would-be empire in the Mid­dle East, North Africa, and Cen­tral and South Asia was designed to rest in part on the bedrock of polit­i­cal Islam. At least that is what its archi­tects hoped. But it proved to be a devil’s game. Only too late, after Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, did Wash­ing­ton begin to dis­cover its strate­gic miscalculation.

The United States spent decades cul­ti­vat­ing Islamists, manip­u­lat­ing and double-crossing them, cyn­i­cally using and mis­us­ing them as Cold War allies, only to find that it spawned a force that turned against its spon­sor, and with a vengeance. Like mon­sters imbued with arti­fi­cial life, rad­i­cal imams, mul­lahs, and aya­tol­lahs stalk the land­scape, thun­der­ing not only against the United States but against free­dom of thought, against sec­u­lar sci­ence, against nation­al­ism and the left, against women’s rights. Some are ter­ror­ists, but far more are just medieval-minded reli­gious fanat­ics who want to turn the cal­en­dar back to the sev­enth century.

…

The United States found polit­i­cal Islam to be a con­ve­nient part­ner dur­ing each stage of America’s empire-building project in the Mid­dle East, from its early entry into the region to its grad­ual mil­i­tary encroach­ment, to its expan­sion into an on-the-ground mil­i­tary pres­ence, and finally to the emer­gence of the United States as an army of occu­pa­tion in Iraq and Afghanistan.

„.

From FDR on, lead­ing U.S. politi­cians were pris­on­ers of mis­guided stereo­types. They seemed entranced by the almost other-worldly appear­ance of their Arab inter­locu­tors. FDR, after meet­ing Ibn Saud, returned to Wash­ing­ton and “could not shake the image of the hawk-like Saudi monarch, ensconced in a gold chair and sur­rounded by six slaves.” Harry Tru­man, two years later, described a lead­ing Saudi offi­cial as a “real old bib­li­cal Arab with chin whiskers, a white gown, gold braid, and every­thing.” And Eisen­hower dis­missed the Arabs as “a very uncer­tain quan­tity, explo­sive and full of prej­u­dices.” The offi­cial record is full of such unin­formed stereo­typ­ing of Arabs and Mus­lims by U.S. offi­cials. For the next sixty years, the hand­ful of Amer­i­can Ara­bists who actu­ally knew some­thing about the Mid­dle East would try to com­bat those stereo­types. But they would fail.

The Amer­i­can attach­ment to a roman­ti­cized fan­tasy of Arab life and a racist-fed, reli­gious dis­dain for the Arabs’ sup­posed hea­thenism proved a deadly com­bi­na­tion when the time came for Amer­ica to engage itself polit­i­cally and mil­i­tar­ily in the Mid­dle East. Per­haps those stereo­types led Amer­i­can pol­icy mak­ers to see Mus­lims as fierce war­riors. Per­haps they believed that the fanati­cism of their reli­gious tenets would lead them to resist athe­is­tic com­mu­nism. Per­haps it was the notion that in south­west Asia the tra­di­tional reli­gious estab­lish­ment was a bul­wark of the sta­tus quo. But it never dawned on U.S. offi­cials that Islamist orga­ni­za­tions such as the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood were a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent phe­nom­e­non from the com­prador cler­i­cal estab­lish­ment. Cer­tainly, as the Cold War pro­gressed, the big enemy, the USSR, and its alleged accom­plice, Arab nation­al­ism, seemed to have a com­mon enemy: Islam.

More from Drey­fuss will be found in the ear­lier essay.

And even now — even now — the United States gov­ern­ment does all this again, with the acqui­es­cence and sup­port of the Democ­rats. At this point, if you are at all hon­est, you must give up the pathetic grasp­ing for expla­na­tions, excuses and jus­ti­fi­ca­tions: that the Democ­rats act as they do because they are weak, or cow­ardly, or being black­mailed. (Hon­estly, will you grow the fuck up?)

This is what they want. When an indi­vid­ual or a gov­ern­ment repeats the same actions over and over and over again, even when those actions appear to lead to dis­as­ter, you must con­clude that they pur­sue those actions because they want to.

Robert Higgs, for the umpteenth time:

As a gen­eral rule for under­stand­ing pub­lic poli­cies, I insist that there are no per­sis­tent “failed” poli­cies. Poli­cies that do not achieve their desired out­comes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. poli­cies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only com­ply with that invalu­able rule of inquiry in pol­i­tics: fol­low the money.

When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. poli­cies in the Mid­dle East to have been wildly suc­cess­ful, so suc­cess­ful that the gains they have pro­duced for the movers and shak­ers in the petro­chem­i­cal, finan­cial, and weapons indus­tries (which is approx­i­mately to say, for those who have the great­est influ­ence in deter­min­ing U.S. for­eign poli­cies) must surely be counted in the hun­dreds of bil­lions of dollars.

So U.S. sol­diers get killed, so Pales­tini­ans get insulted, robbed, and con­fined to a set of squalid con­cen­tra­tion areas, so the “peace process” never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the poli­cies fail­ures; these things are all sur­face froth, costs not borne by the pol­icy mak­ers them­selves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine tax­pay­ers at large, and for­eign­ers who count for nothing.

The rul­ing class is doing just fine, thank you. And none of this will change with a Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dent, and with the Democ­rats hav­ing large majori­ties in both houses of Con­gress. None of it, not in any sig­nif­i­cant manner.

So, do we all under­stand now? Good. [Once Upon a Time…]

I agree. When the gov­ern­ment is sup­port­ing ter­ror­ist groups and directly engag­ing in kid­nap­ping, tor­ture, and mur­der, and the Democ­rats not only know all this but actively approve and sup­port it, it’s much too late to pre­tend that vot­ing for Democ­rats will in any way change things. What’s more, most of the peo­ple in the United States either don’t care about what their gov­ern­ment is doing, are actively in denial, or are actively sup­port­ing it. All the vot­ers really care about is “Amerika über alles.”

In response to the gen­eral inad­e­quacy and unpleas­ant­ness of Mov­able Type, I’m look­ing at Word­Press again. I had orig­i­nally rejected it in favor of Mov­able Type when I was look­ing for a Radio User­land replace­ment, but that was in 2006. That’s plenty of time for it to have improved significantly.

Per­haps it would even be able to import my old Radio posts–something I could never get Mov­able Type to do.

A com­pany com­puter and ques­tions about e-mail pri­vacy.

A com­pany com­puter and ques­tions about e-mail pri­vacy — Via Pri­vacy : Tech news from CNET :

When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry enough. Then he found out that his for­mer employer was read­ing his per­sonal Yahoo e-mail mes­sages, after he had left the company.

In a law­suit that he filed in May against Struc­tured Set­tle­ment Invest­ments, the finance com­pany he used to run, Sidell claims that exec­u­tives at the com­pany went so far as to read e-mail mes­sages that he had sent to his lawyers dis­cussing his strat­egy for win­ning an arbi­tra­tion claim over his lost job.

“It’s kind of like the other side gets your play­book, or they’re spy­ing on your locker room,” said Rus­sell Green, a lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Sidell. He said his client was now using a new e-mail address.  read more »

[Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

This hap­pened because Sidell and his lawyers were igno­rant. It’s no secret that email is very easy to inter­cept by pretty much any­one with the incli­na­tion to do so–and not just gov­ern­ments, but com­pa­nies and even hack­ers. This has been men­tioned repeat­edly even in the main­stream media, so they cer­tainly should have known bet­ter. It’s really quite sim­ple: if you don’t want any­body else read­ing your, email encrypt it.

Fire­fox 3 Already Rules the Roost. Barence writes in with a data point on Fire­fox 3 adop­tion: it’s been avail­able for 10 days, and already one site is see­ing 55% of its Firefox-using vis­i­tors on ver­sion 3. “Microsoft still has three out of ten peo­ple run­ning an old ver­sion of its browser more than 18 months after Inter­net Explorer 7 launched, while Fire­fox has con­verted more than half of its users to the lat­est ver­sion in just over a week. That should set a few alarm bells ring­ing in Redmond.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

This analy­sis over­looks some­thing impor­tant: peo­ple use Fire­fox because they want to use Fire­fox. Regard­less of what ver­sion they’re using, they’ve made a con­scious deci­sion to down­load and install it. Peo­ple use Inter­net Explorer because they don’t know any bet­ter, or because they’re using a cor­po­rate machine that won’t let them install any­thing else. It’s hardly sur­pris­ing that Fire­fox users would upgrade their ver­sion more quickly than IE users.

The “upgrade” to Mov­able Type 4.12 seems to have killed style I was using, and made it impos­si­ble to put back–at least for me. I’ve been try­ing to find a solu­tion, but Mov­able Type has very lit­tle doc­u­men­ta­tion and its inter­face is a tan­gled mess.

My orig­i­nal motive for chang­ing ver­sions was to use that iPod Touch plu­gin, which does seem to be work­ing, but in ret­ro­spect it def­i­nitely wasn’t worthwhile.

Per­son­ally, I’d much rather use Con­ver­sant, but unfor­tu­nately it’s not some­thing I could get my web host­ing com­pany to install.

There’s a bit of fuss today about the rul­ing by the Nazgûl in the Heller case. As I expected, they took the same posi­tion that Ashcroft did sev­eral years ago, which is (short­ened considerably):

“The Sec­ond Amend­ment means what it says, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights, and we’ll ignore it when­ever we want to, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights.”

The out­come is entirely pre­dictable, of course; so much so that I just copied and pasted the above quote from a pre­dic­tion I had made on a web forum yesterday.

iPhone 2.0 to fea­ture extra data-wipe secu­rity?. Wip­ing data off an iPhone should become more secure with the v2.0 firmware than in the cur­rent release, say sources using the most recent beta. Although both the v1.x and 2.0 releases present users with an “Erase All Con­tents and Set­tings” option, v1.x only per­forms a reg­u­lar dele­tion; v2.0 should mimic the “Secure Empty Trash” option of Mac OS X,… [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

The arti­cle men­tions that it takes “about an hour,” so you’d have to know well ahead of time that the phone would need to be wiped. This would make it use­ful for any­one with an iPhone who is enter­ing the Evil Empire, though–they could wipe the phone shortly before the plane lands so that when the Gestapo tries to steal their data there won’t be any­thing left for them.

As an exper­i­ment, this post was writ­ten on an iPod Touch. It works pretty well, but tap­ping away on a tiny key­board isn’t very comfortable.

Mex­ico police fired over stam­pede. Mex­ico City author­i­ties sack 17 police offi­cers after a night­club raid caused a stam­pede that killed 12 peo­ple. [BBC News]

No doubt if this hap­pened in Amer­ica, the cops would have been commended.

I’ve upgraded the soft­ware behind this weblog to Mov­able Type 4.12. The process remains highly unpleas­ant, very slow, and with inad­e­quate and incor­rect documentation.