Author Archives: Dave Krueger

Whose drones are whose?

According to the New York Times, recent drone attacks in Pakistan are being disavowed by the CIA.

“They were not ours,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the drone program’s secrecy. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”

Sounds like another case of leaks of classified information that will never be prosecuted because they serve the government’s purposes.

What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one or possibly both of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the C.I.A. to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.

If the American version is true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani Army falsely claimed responsibility for American drone strikes in an attempt to mask C.I.A. activities on its soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the Pakistani military may be using the same program to disguise its own operations.

So, let me get this straight.  The Pakistanis  say the CIA did it, but they used to cover for the secret CIA attacks.  But now we’re supposed to believe the CIA when they say they didn’t do it.  The article then goes on to explain the difficulty in getting any accurate information out of the area because foreign reporters are barred from the area and local reporters are subject to pressures from powerful local influences.  And it’s not like the U.S. government has established any credibility when it comes to telling the truth about…  anything.

If one thing is clear about the drones, it is that all sides — Pakistanis, Americans and the Taliban — have an interest in manipulating reports about their impact.

I’m sure Pakistanis all realize that American drone attacks are for their own good.  They should consider it an honor to have American bombs falling on them.  It’s not like the U.S. just bombs anyone, you know.  Well, okay, that last part isn’t true.

Viewed from Washington, a handful of erroneously reported strikes may seem inconsequential. According to most estimates, the C.I.A. has carried out about 330 drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt since 2004, the vast majority of them in the past five years.

Yet in Pakistan, they carry greater significance, igniting huge and sometimes violent anti-American demonstration that make drones a toxic subject for generals and politicians alike. But the American claims about the two attacks this month suggest that they may, also, be trying to have the best of both worlds.

It certainly is a great government in Pakistan, one of our great allies in the war on terror, that agrees to let the U.S. routinely bomb their citizens.

This all seems so distant, of course.Pakistan is half way around the world.  Who cares what happens there?  And it’s not like that kind of militaristic, drone-dominated environment will ever come to “the land of the free”. Right?

 

 

Update on the bystanders shot up by LAPD during the Dorner manhunt

This is an interesting video.  Check out all the bullet holes this guy has in his house from when the LAPD opened fire, mistakenly thinking they were shooting at Chrisopher Dorner last month.  And, of course, LAPD isn’t talking about it.  Presumably they will handle it like any other unjustified shooting of citizens by cops: stretch out the investigation until the public loses interest and then clear the cops of any wrong-doing.

The End of the Road

I watched this documentary yesterday on Netflix and thought it was pretty good.  It’s only about an hour long, but it does a good job of painting a clear picture of why the Federal Reserve keeps inflating the money supply and where such a policy is ultimately going to lead.  My only complaint is that it sounds like a sales pitch for gold from guys who stand to gain by your buying gold through them.  That is not to say that buying gold isn’t a good idea.  I think it is a good idea for the very reasons described in the movie.

An easy way to knock $53 billion out of the deficit

All this talk about how sequestration is going to devastate the government is getting me down.  The cuts during the first year are supposed to be something like $85 billion, which constitutes about 2.4% of total government spending (3.5 trillion in 2012) and only a fraction of the normal 6-8% annual increase in federal spending.  Of course, sequestration doesn’t permit tailoring the cuts to allow a more sensible approach, but that’s only because Congress and the President have an abysmal record of actually cutting anything even under urgent circumstances.

So, I propose we immediately end all foreign aid.  That immediately saves $50+ billion per year.  That would also have the immediate benefit of reducing corruption throughout the world, reducing U.S. intervention in the politics of other countries, and forcing many European and Asian countries to start paying for their own defense.

Ah, if only such suggestions could actually find their way into the deficit debate, but they can’t.  If Congress and the President had the integrity required to reduce spending and balance the budget, they would never have let us get $16T in debt to begin with.  But, government doesn’t attract people with integrity and people don’t elect candidates who exhibit integrity.  We have met the enemy and he is us.

Student suspended for disarming another student

A 16 year old Ft Meyers, Florida high school student has been suspended for wrestling a loaded gun away from another student who was threatening to shoot another student.  From Fox 4:

The student grappled the gun away from the 15-year-old suspect on the bus ride home Tuesday after witnesses say he aimed the weapon point blank at another student and threatened to shoot him.

This is yet another one of those cases where rigid rules are substituted for common sense.

According to the referral, he was suspended for being part of an “incident” where a weapon was present and given an “emergency suspension.”

But…

According to the mother, the school suspended her son because he refused to cooperate in the investigation. She says he was scared.

One can only wonder what that means.  Maybe he was refusing to answer questions.

As for the kid with the gun:

Despite the fact the suspect pointed a loaded gun at another student and threatened to shoot, authorities charged him with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon “without intent” to kill.

There will be no “film at eleven”:

Authorities were unable to watch the school bus surveillance video because the cameras weren’t working.

The story doesn’t seem to have enough detail to really understand what happened, but it seems like the outcome was the best scenario possible under the circumstances.  No doubt if there had been a cop around, they would be mourning one or more deaths now.

Encryption: The only cure for warrantless eavesdropping?

Governments around the world are beginning to recognize how the internet shifts the balance of power away from government toward the citizenry and they are taking the threat very seriously.  Not a week goes by without a news story of government attempts to expand their power to monitor and control the internet.  These power grabs usually take the form of legislation disguised as measures to control child porn, copyright infringement, or terrorism, but they have been less than successful because of the public outrage they sometimes inspire.  So, when it comes to monitoring internet communications, the government has taken to cloaking its operations in secrecy, thereby thwarting any opportunity for anyone to know whether they are being spied on.  If you have no way of finding out whether the government is monitoring your communications, you are powerless to challenge them on it.  And it is exactly that tactic that permits the government to sidestep any Fourth Amendment limitations.  Basically, when it comes to the internet, the requirement for a search warrant is dead.

So, while the government will presumably always have the power to pull the plug on the internet, you can fight back against their monitoring by using encryption.  According to reason.com, encryption schemes have not integrated well into email clients and other communications software…

But Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload fame has stepped in to fill the gap. Facing prosecution for his old cloud storage service, Dotcom has not only battled extradition to the United States from New Zealand, he has started Mega, a new encrypted cloud storage service. And what better to go with your encrypted cloud storage than an encrypted means of discussing what you keep in there? Says Dotcom of his new email service, “we’re going to extend this to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won’t have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email.”

Unfortunately, Kim Dotcom has not been very successful in fighting extradition to the U.S. where he faces charges of piracy, racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering.

Nevertheless, better encryption software is being pursued and is already available from some vendors.  The real question is whether those vendors will be able to adequately convince the public that they aren’t in cahoots with the government, providing them a way to decrypt the traffic without ever telling the public.  With the powers the government has acquired since 9/11, it seems very likely that a software company could be compelled to provide backdoor mechanisms for the NSA and be forced to keep it a secret under threat of prosecution.

Such is life in “the land of the free”.

“Legalize it and tax it!”

That is a mantra that always accompanies any discussion about legalizing pot.  Americans seem to take it for granted that anything that isn’t necessary for survival is a luxury that should be taxed.  If it involves a perceived vice, it’s almost as if guilt takes over and a subconscious need for punishment kicks in.

Colorado’s Amendment 64 Implementation Task Force seems to be taking this concept to heart.  From reason.com:

The Denver Post reports that the task force wants marijuana to be heavily taxed. Amendment 64 calls for an excise tax collected at the wholesale level “not to exceed 15 percent prior to January 1, 2017, and at a rate to be determined by the General Assembly thereafter.” The task force says the initial rate should be the full 15 percent and recommends a special tax at the retail level on top of that, in addition to the standard state and local sales taxes. “Though the task force did not endorse a specific amount for the sales tax,” the Post says, “it gave a 25 percent rate as an example.” Both taxes would have to be approved by voters.

I can’t help but worry that if the drug war ever ends, the government will find a way of making legalization even worse than the drug war.  High taxes may ultimately result in a black market for legal pot just as high taxes perpetuate a black market in alcohol and tobacco.  It must be some kind of chicken and egg thing.  Do people get stupid after becoming affiliated with government or do they have to be stupid to get into government in the first place?

Out of control government secrecy is why we need more Bradley Mannings

Glenn Greenwald has a great reaction to Manning’s appearance yesterday:

Heroism is a slippery and ambiguous concept. But whatever it means, it is embodied by Bradley Manning and the acts which he unflinchingly acknowledged today he chose to undertake. The combination of extreme government secrecy, a supine media (see the prior twocolumns), and a disgracefully subservient judiciary means that the only way we really learn about what our government does is when the Daniel Ellsbergs – and Bradley Mannings – of the world risk their own personal interest and liberty to alert us.

Lincoln’s oft quoted words, “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” are nothing more than a meaningless arrangement of letters in a state where the government hides behind an impenetrable iron curtain of secrecy.   The U.S. government has a long history of secrecy, deceit, and intolerance of whistle-blowers, but 9/11 provided the excuse it needed to expand that methodology to the point where the U.S. can no longer be readily distinguished from the totalitarian police states erected under communism and fascism.

Today, U.S. government secrecy has little to do with national security and everything to do with shielding its actions from oversight or Constitutional challenge and avoiding embarrassing exposure of its brutality, corruption, and incompetence.

The U.S. government now routinely terrorizes the innocent people of other countries by killing them, imposing crippling sanctions on their already suffering economies, inciting civil war among them and hatred toward the U.S., interfering in their politics, supporting their corrupt despotic heads of state, over-throwing their government leaders (elected or not), provoking them into war, or sometimes simply by backing other nations that do these same things. And it does most of this in secret and it does all of it in the name of the American people, in your name.

Of course, after the next devastating terrorist attack, Americans will be told that some evil immoral enemy has attacked us through no fault of our own.  The dead will be declared innocent victims as we immediately acquiesce to new wars and further erosion of what freedom we have left.  Then the following November we will run to the polls and happily reelect all the same people who brought this down on us.

The fact is that Bradley Manning did more to hold our government accountable than any politician ever elected to Congress or the White House.  A government that shrouds itself in secrecy is not, and never will be, a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people“.  Manning is not the poison.  He’s part of the antidote because he courageously pushed back against that secrecy and will pay for it for the rest of his life.  The other part of the antidote is us.  All we need to do is go to the polls and throw out the self-serving politicians of both parties in Washington who perpetuate this secrecy and the corruption that it conceals.  It’s easy to do and won’t cost us a thing.  If we don’t, we will simply get what we deserve.

Resolution would allow Israel to commit U.S. to war

According to this story in the HuffPo, a group of U.S. Senators wants to pass a resolution in support of Israel.

The United States would back Israel militarily if the Mideast ally were to attack Iran in self-defense, a bipartisan group of senators said Thursday in introducing a forceful resolution.

This fits right in with the new definition of self-defense which now includes attacking another country because you think they might attack you or might have the capability of attacking you sometime in the future.

“No one wants another conflict anywhere in the world militarily, but we also don’t want a nuclear-capable Iran,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at a news conference.

A pretty good case can be made that the government of any country that is as much under military threat from the U.S. and Israel as Iran is, would be derelict if it weren’t pursuing nuclear weapons.

The rest of the quotes in the article are essentially politicians swearing that this is not a blank check to Israel, even though that’s what it amounts to.  Of course, U.S. foreign policy has, for decades, put U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic power behind Israel.

The group hopes to pass the resolution before President Barack Obama’s expected trip to Israel in March.

As the Times of Israel has already reported, Obama is expected to commit U.S. lives and treasure to stop Iran’s nuclear program if Israel promises to sit it out.

Will sequestration really gut military readiness?

Despite all the doomsday hype coming out of our warmongering political class, here is what sequestration will do to defense spending.

From Wikipedia (referencing the CBO)

The spending sequester in the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) essentially freezes defense spending in current dollar terms for the 2013-2021 period, limiting growth to approximately 1.5% per year (about the rate of the Consumer Price Index) versus approximately 8% per year over the past decade. CBO estimated defense spending under the sequester (excluding war spending called “overseas contingency operations”) from 2012 to 2021 would be $5.8 trillion, versus $6.3 trillion estimated prior to passage of the BCA, an avoidance of about $500 billion in additional spending over a decade. Spending would decline from $562 billion in 2012 to $538 billion in 2013, then slowly rise to $637 billion by 2021.[2]

Here is what reason.com has to say:

Nevertheless, even if these sequesters do kick in, the feds will spend more in 2013 than they spent in 2012. That’s because the sequesters are not cuts to spending; rather, they are reductions in planned increases in spending. The reductions amount to about two cents for every planned dollar of increased spending for every federal department.

What you need to remember when assessing the reports in the establishment media is that sequestration, while hardly constituting even a minor dent in defense capacity, is income that the military industrial complex won’t be seeing and that is the reason for the fear mongering.   Exemptions steer many of the cuts away from most of the really politically sensitive spending (military pay, health care, retirement, and most benefits).  But, not a single defense program is  eliminated by sequestration, but the air force and navy will be buying fewer airplanes and conducting fewer costly operations.

Just to put things in proper perspective, the U.S. military spending isn’t exactly suffering.  We could actually cut spending in half and still be spending more than all of our so-called potential enemies combined.

defensespending

Of course, since war spending is exempt from sequestration, we should all brace for more war as a path around the required cuts.  I doubt the public will even notice.