Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 30, 2010 1:35 am

Say that ten times fast:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday denounced the disclosure this week of 75,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war by the Web site WikiLeaks, asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets.  Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates portrayed the documents as “a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old” that offered little insight into current policies and events.

“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world…Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries… We endeavor to push access to sensitive battlefield information down to where it is most useful — on the front lines — where as a practical matter there are fewer restrictions and controls than at rear headquarters…In the wake of this incident, it will be a real challenge to strike the right balance between security and providing our frontline troops the information they need.”

Mr. Gates said the documents’ disclosure had prompted a rethinking of a trend nearly two decades old, dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, of trying to make intelligence information more accessible to troops in combat situations so they can respond rapidly to developments.

Meanwhile, the leaker-in-chief, Assange, plans to leak more documents:

Assange said he wasn’t surprised by the White House’s condemnation of the leak. He said the U.S. government, like other scrutinized subjects, seeks to “criticize the messenger to detract from the power of the message.”  He also rejected the notion that the leak would pose a security risk for the United States, saying that the material is more than seven months old and had no “operational consequence.”

Assange told reporters in London that what’s been reported so far on the leaked documents has “only scratched the surface” and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 27, 2010 1:59 am

The consensus at the NYTimes is that despite 90,000 once-classified documents on the Afghan war, nothing new was revealed.  Let’s see what the panel o’ experts said:

James Morin, former U.S. Army officer: 

“Perhaps the most interesting story in this leak is how little real news there is.”

Kori Schake, Hoover Institution: 

“But we knew these things.”

Rachel Kleinfeld, Truman National Security Project: 

“But in the case of WikiLeaks’ document dump, there’s not much that a casual observer wouldn’t already know.”

Gilles Dorronsoro, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 

“While the disclosure of thousands of classified military documents reveals a darker picture of the war in Afghanistan, it’s not as important as many people believe.”

Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations: 

“While the sheer volume of Wikileaks’ secret U.S. military documents from 2004 to 2009 is staggering, the information contained therein is well-known.”

Nothing to see here, move along.  While this seems to be consensus, the power of the 90,000 documents is that now there is official evidence of what people thought, heard about, already “knew.”  That power should not be underestimated.  The weight of these documents are not measured in pounds (or kilos), but in some metric of the popular culture.  What happens when governments are forced to acknowledge what they do during war, as it is happening (as opposed to 50 years later, when the reports are declassified and the histories are written)?

UPDATE:  President Obama has also said the documents are not news:

As Mr. Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden, “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.”

Comments (7)

By Joshua, July 26, 2010 2:04 am

Two recent major, major stories from America’s leading newspapers paint a disturbing and downcast portrait of the War on Terror, started by Bush and continued by Obama.

First is the Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series, which portrays an American intelligence community growing and spinning out of control:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

And today, The New York Times releases information obtained by Wikileaks, painting the Afghanistan war from the ground up, showing why the war is long, and seemingly far from over:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.  The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.

In reaction to these major, damaging reports, the intelligence community and the Obama administration are on the defensive.  In response to Top Secret America, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a press statement:

In 2004, Congress and the Administration, in the midst of two wars, mandated structural Intelligence Community reforms and created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to mobilize a new, integrated Intelligence Community (IC) workforce and eliminate barriers to information sharing. Many of those reforms are less than five years old. While we have made significant progress, much work remains…

Also, what may appear to be unnecessary redundancy in analysis and analytic products is, in many instances,intentional overlap. The IC must be equipped to produce tailored intelligence for different customer sets…

Information sharing, while better than it has ever been, remains a significant challenge for the IC. Complex technical, legal and institutional barriers remain such as multiple information systems and legal regimes to protect privacy and constitutional rights.We have always acknowledged that there is much work to be done, but no assessment of the IC is accurate or complete without recognizing that progress in information sharing is real…

In response to the NYTimes report, the Obama administration denied misleading the public on the Afghanistan war:

White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.

“On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on Al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years,” said Gen. James L. Jones, White House national security adviser, in a statement released Sunday.  “We know that serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like Al Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train,” the statement said.

General Jones also decried the decision by WikiLeaks to make the documents public, saying that the United States “strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.  WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted,” General Jones said.

The U.S. government is in damage control mode.  With all the talk of folding newspaper companies and the end of the news media, out comes the very reason why we have it: new information that the government doesn’t want their people to know, in order to reinvigorate debates over the War on Terror.

Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 25, 2010 5:12 am

This is how the story is portrayed: a new conversion law in Israel would put conversions in the hands on “non-zionist” orthodox Jews from the most fundamntalist of sects.  Those from the ultra-Orthodox applaud the proposed bill, while all other Jews are hostile to it:

The bill that so angered American Jewish leaders was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis among the 1 million who moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Those Israelis are not, by Orthodox rabbinic law, considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage. The law would have tried to make conversion easier by granting conversion powers to local rabbis across the country, a group considered closer to their communities.  But after objections from the ultra-Orthodox, the bill formally placed authority for conversion in the hands of the chief rabbinate and declared Orthodox Jewish law to be the basis of conversion, making Americans fear that their more lenient conversion processes would be invalidated.

The “who is a Jew?” question is a very old one, and one that is separating American Jews from the right-wing Orthodox in Israel:

David Rotem, the lawmaker behind the conversion bill, said in an interview that such views were based on a misreading of it.  “They need to check the facts before they speak,” he said of Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders. “They are acting like absolute idiots.”

The question of “who is a Jew?” is as old as the state of Israel. The more liberal forms of Jewish practice advocated by the Reform and Conservative movements, with which most American Jews are affiliated, have never taken root here. Israel has left liturgy in the hands of the Orthodox, with most Israeli Jews leading almost completely secular lives, seeking out rabbis only at birth, marriage and death.

The idea is that helping to build the Jewish state is their central means of expressing their ethnic identity. By contrast, Jews abroad seek one another out in synagogues, and have come up with ways to integrate spirituality with identity, forging rituals that respect tradition while adjusting to careers and life in a non-Jewish world.

To understand this from a rather pointed American perspective, Peter Beinhart’s New York Review of Books article, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” is required reading.  In essence, he says:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

In good Jewish tradition, it is necessary to have a dissenting view.  This is one from Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, of whom in his article Beinhart had particularly harsh words:

[Beinhart] sees an Israel that is clearly moving to the right, that has less regard for the “other,” no matter who that may be, and that is unwilling to take seriously efforts toward peace. Beinart seems to be suffering from the same problems we have seen in the Obama administration, ignoring what Israel has gone through over the last decade and thereby misreading what Israelis are thinking today.

Of course, Beinhart replies.  At this point, I want to point out that Judaism is a broad tent, regardles of whether the fundamentalist wing thinks of it this way.  Since 1948, Israel has been the Big Reality that all Jews, regardless of whether they have faith in the Lord, or are secular, or express their ethnicity in some way meaningful to them, or whatever.  Israel, the Big Reality, is a Big, Complicated Place, and its problems are not going to disappear quickly, no matter who does the conversions.  Personally, I would rather see conversions not controlled by a fundamentalist sect; such control would serve to weaken an already beleaguered state.  To reject Reform, or Conservative or, in some cases, Orthodox conversion because the far-right fundamentalist wing thinks the conversion by the American Orthodox wasn’t done correctly, is to pull the plug on Israel’s future.

Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 22, 2010 1:46 am

Or is this another American Butthash Media story?  This sounds awfully fishy:

Jerusalem (CNN) — The lawyer for a 30-year-old Palestinian married father of two who has admitted in a plea bargain to rape by deception said Wednesday he will appeal his client’s sentence, which was handed up Monday.  “Eighteen months in prison is too much,” said Adnan Aladdin. He is representing Saber Kashour, the Israeli Palestinian who admitted pretending to be a single Jewish man before having sex with an Israeli woman.  Kashour already has been detained for two months, followed by about two years of house arrest, his lawyer said. “According to the bargain, he should be punished, but we expect him to receive community service on appeal in about 30 days’ time,” Aladdin added.

Kashour told CNN the relations with the woman, who has not been identified publicly, were consensual.  “The girl is the one who started flirting with me and talking to me, and she is the one who wanted the thing from beginning to end,” he said. “I met her on a West Jerusalem street, she approached me and started flirting with me. Within 15 minutes, she wanted to be with me, and we were together.”  Aladdin described his client’s liaison in more detail: “There was a short foreplay a few minutes before; during the foreplay, the guy tells a few lies, the lady tells a few lies. They both have one goal, and that is to go to bed together. After the sexual intercourse, which was totally consensual, the lady decides to claim that the guy raped her brutally. She comes to court and testifies that this was a case of rape in which there was the use of force.

“At this stage, the defense decides to make an independent investigation. The investigation came up with new facts upon which the D.A. [district attorney] decides to give up the claim the sex was not consensual. So both sides agreed that the sexual intercourse was consensual. However, the D.A. still wanted to charge him with rape by deception. So this is the best the defense could do in this case. We are appealing the very long sentence.”

Kashour, who acknowledged having told the woman he was single, said he is known as “Dudu,” a nickname for the Jewish name “David,” but also his own nickname.

“Apparently, later she discovered that I was an Arab and complained to the police,” he said.

“I did not say anything or commit anything wrong,” he insisted, adding that he did not understand how his misrepresentations could result in a rape charge. “If I told the woman I was a pilot and later she finds out that I was not a pilot, then she goes and says that ‘He raped me’? If I told her that I was a millionaire and it turns out that I am a poor man, then she goes and says that ‘He raped me’?”

“It is terrible, but the law says very clearly that if someone has sexual intercourse using deception about his identity to conduct the act, it can be considered rape,” said Leah Samael, a lawyer specializing in civil rights and human rights cases.

But, if the circumstances had been different — if a religious Jew had said he was not religious in order to woo a potential suitor — “he would not be brought to court,” she said. “And I am not sure that, on this occasion, it is a reason to charge. To have intercourse in daytime in a deserted building in the center of town — I say the circumstances speak for themselves.”

She added, “The thing that interests me in the case is the need, the necessity, of Arabs in Israel to pretend. To speak without an accent so as not to be seen as Arabs. To dress not to look like Arabs.”  She predicted Kashour would prevail. “I don’t know if he will be acquitted, but he has served his punishment,” she said.

Criminal law rarely applies to minor lies, like dyed hair or a changed name,” said Dana Pugach of the Noga Legal Center for Victims of Crime. “But it would apply to the more meaningful lies,” she said.  “For example, where a doctor persuades a woman to have sex claiming it would be a part of the medical treatment. As for this particular case, it is not the fact that he was an Arab and claimed to be Jewish. The court emphasized the fact that he claimed to be single while he was married, which would be relevant in the context of a romantic relationship.”

Kashour expressed regret, but not for the alleged victim. “I would only be upset and regret this because I have put my wife through pain and upset her, but I did not [do] anything wrong with the girl.”  His is the second conviction on the charge of rape by deception. In 2008, the Israeli High Court of Justice convicted Zvi Sliman for impersonating an official in the Housing Ministry and promising women help and benefits to persuade them to have sex with him. Sliman was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

California and Tennessee have similar laws.  In Massachusetts, a similar law was being debated:

Massachusetts legislators considered a bill Wednesday that would close a loophole in rape laws to allow prosecutors to bring charges against people who gain a victim’s consent to sex through deception.  Under current law, rape in Massachusetts can only be prosecuted if the act involves force and non-consent. The law does not protect victims who have been intentionally duped into having sex without force or violence.  “There is a myth that rape only happens in a dark alley by a stranger — this is not true,” said Rep. Peter Koutoujian.

Without the new legislation, police and prosecutors are virtually helpless when someone reports a rape that occurred because the victim was deceived or tricked into consenting. In another case of “fraud” rape, a lab technician posed as a medical doctor and sexually assaulted a woman. Legislators said they hope changing the law will prevent future rapes and bring those guilty of any form of rape to justice.

“The intent of the crime is the same, and so the punishment should be the same,” Koutoujian said. “We not only have the judicial mandate to file this legislation, we have a moral obligation.”

Rape by deception is just as damaging and illegal as rape by force, said Middlesex County District Attorney Gerry Leone.  “We have always known that ‘No means no,’ and the current law allows us to effectively prosecute those cases,” Leone said. “What this bill makes clear is that you cannot deceive or defraud a victim into saying yes.”

California and Tennessee already have “rape by fraud” legislation. If the law passes here, a common concern is that the legislation’s vague language regarding deception will result in women who have been seduced by men posing as someone else or claiming to be unmarried filing rape charges.

Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 19, 2010 3:47 am

Say it ain’t so, Joe:

Federal election officials have fined Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign more than $219,000 to cover excessive contributions and shoddy record-keeping during his 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination.A report prepared in April but only approved Friday by the Federal Election Commission found Biden’s campaign had inadequately reported more than $3.7 million in spending and more than $870,000 in debts. The audit also found that Biden had been too slow to return nearly $1.2 million to donors who had already given the $2,300 contribution limit.

Ultimately, the audit found the Biden campaign had not returned $106,216 in excess contributions from donors. The audio also uncovered $85,900 in so-called “stale checks” which the campaign had paid out to cover debts and excessive contributions but the payees had never deposited the funds.

Comments (0)

By Joshua, July 6, 2010 4:20 am

An interesting NYTimes article:

HAR BRACHA, West Bank — Twice a year, American evangelicals show up at a winery in this Jewish settlement in the hills of ancient Samaria to play a direct role in biblical prophecy, picking grapes and pruning vines.

Believing that Christian help for Jewish winemakers here in the occupied West Bank foretells Christ’s second coming, they are recruited by a Tennessee-based charity called HaYovel that invites volunteers “to labor side by side with the people of Israel” and “to share with them a passion for the soon coming jubilee in Yeshua, messiah.”

But during their visit in February the volunteers found themselves in the middle of the fight for land that defines daily life here. When the evangelicals headed into the vineyards, they were pelted with rocks by Palestinians who say the settlers have planted creeping grape vines on their land to claim it as their own. Two volunteers were hurt. In the ensuing scuffle, a settler guard shot a 17-year-old Palestinian shepherd in the leg.

“These people are filled with ideas that this is the Promised Land and their duty is to help the Jews,” said Izdat Said Qadoos of the neighboring Palestinian village. “It is not the Promised Land. It is our land.”

HaYovel is one of many groups in the United States using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories — effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace.

The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Read it all, as they say.

Comments (7)

By Joshua, July 1, 2010 2:20 am

Weird things in the story about 11 spies reporting to Moscow:

President Barack Obama last week took Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to his favorite hamburger joint, which turned out to be just blocks from the Arlington, Va., apartment building where one of the alleged Russian secret agents lived.

How do we know this is Obama’s favorite hamburger joint?  And what is the name of this alleged favorite? 

He said Mr. Obama was aware of the alleged spy ring, but the president didn’t discuss the topic in face-to-face meetings last week with Mr. Medvedev.

Really.  We’re really expected to believe Obama said nothing about it when he has the President of Russia right in front of him.  Perhaps the “secret message” Obama sent by taking Medvedev to Obama’s “favorite” hamburger “joint” was message enough, huh?  That showed him.  Here, Prez Medvedev:  eat this HAMBURGER.  (*hee hee*)

A criminal complaint filed Monday by prosecutors in New York showed that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents have been investigating the alleged Russian agents for a decade, and have had access to communications between Moscow and the suspects.

TEN YEARS?  How many secret secrets have these secret spies secreted away to Moscow in 10 years?  They could’ve taken America’s whole secret shebang in ten years.  Bush and Obama didn’t want anyone looking at the White House guest list and they let Moscow spies run around for 10 years?  I got two words for that: FISHY.

Ten of the suspects, mostly Russians, were arrested in recent days in several U.S. cities. The 11th person, whom U.S. authorities alleged was a ringleader purporting to be a Canadian named Christopher Metsos, was taken into custody Tuesday by police in Cyprus. He was released on bond, despite U.S. concerns that he might flee.

Some judges don’t allow guys who sell an ounce of pot to be put on bail, and they let an alleged spy — whose whole business is to lie to others and disappear — out on bail?  See the two words above for what I think about that, too.

Many Russian officials and analysts said they presumed that hawkish elements within the U.S. government had engineered and timed the arrests to embarrass President Obama and undermine the “reset.”

Why not?  It’s fun to blame the Republicans!  Here’s another one:  “It’s hot today.  Must be global warming.  Blame the Republicans for not signing the Kyoto Protocol!”  Hee hee!  This is fun!

What we learned:

(1)  Spies exist, but this spy story is a bunch of low level crap.

(2)  Republicans didn’t have anything to do with it.

(3)  This is not the Cold War.

(4)  Hee hee.

UPDATE:  I exist.

Comments Off

By Joshua, June 28, 2010 4:14 am

I wrote the following one year ago, when I went to the Auschwitz museum near Krakow.  I emailed this to friends and family, but never posted it on-line.  I am going again to the museum as part of a summer school program I help run/teach here in Poland.  For those who have never been to Auschwitz, or are planning on going, you might find this of interest.

These are notes and reflections on the Auschwitz-Birkinau (hereafter “Auschwitz”) trip.  These are designed as a practical guide, plus my observations on the museum and other aspects of the trip.

Continue reading 'Notes on a Trip to Auschwitz'»

Comments Off

By Joshua, June 24, 2010 5:48 am

Don’t be stupid, folks: send those cribs back to the store:

More than 2 million cribs from seven companies were recalled Thursday amid concerns that babies can suffocate, become trapped or fall from the cribs.Most of the cribs were drop-sides, which have a side rail that moves up and down so parents can lift children from them more easily. That movable side, however, can malfunction or detach from the crib, creating a dangerous gap where babies’ heads can become trapped, leading to suffocation or strangulation.

The companies involved in the recall were Evenflo, Delta Enterprises Corp., Child Craft, Jardine Enterprises, LaJobi, Million Dollar Baby and Simmons Juvenile Products Inc.

No deaths were associated with the cribs, but there were reports of at least 16 entrapments of infants. In one case, a child was found unconscious and later hospitalized.

In the announcement from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, all seven companies recalled drop-side cribs. Delta and Child Craft also acknowledged problems with fixed-side cribs.

Drop-sides have increasingly come under scrutiny, with several warnings from the CPSC in the last year that the cribs can be deadly. CPSC Chairman Inez Tenenbaum has pledged to ban their manufacture and sale by year’s end.

“This new recall announcement is part of a larger effort by CPSC to clean up the marketplace from many of these unsafe cribs,” said Tenenbaum. “Most of these recalled cribs have dangerous drop-sides, while the Delta crib can pose a danger to babies if the mattress support is installed incorrectly.”

CPSC urged parents to stop using the cribs and contact the manufacturers for repair kits to immobilize the drop-side or information to make the cribs more secure.

The recalls involved about:

_750,000 Jenny Lind drop-side cribs distributed by Evenflo Inc.

_747,000 Delta drop-side cribs. Delta is also urging parents to check all fixed and drop-side cribs that use wooden stabilizer bars to support the mattress. The company says the bars can be installed upside down, causing the mattress platform to collapse. CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said Delta “was not cooperative with providing the full number of units involved in the mattress support assembly problem.”

_306,000 Bonavita, Babi Italia and ISSI drop-side cribs manufactured by LaJobi Inc.

_130,000 Jardine drop-side cribs imported by Toys R Us.

_156,000 Million Dollar Baby drop-side cribs.

_50,000 Simmons drop-side cribs.

_40,000 to 50,000 Child Craft brand stationary-side cribs and an unknown number of Child Craft brand drop-sides. Child Craft ceased operations last summer and sold its name to Foundations Worldwide Inc., which did not manufacture or sell any of the recalled cribs but will offer rebates for some of them.

With Thursday’s recall, 9 million drop-side cribs have been recalled in the past five years. Drop-sides have been blamed in the deaths of at least 32 infants and toddlers since 2000. The cribs are suspected in another 14 infant fatalities during that time.

Comments Off

By Joshua, June 24, 2010 1:52 am

A Rolling Stone article convinced President Obama to fire Gen. McChrystal and hire Gen. Petraeus.  Petraeus faces an uphill climb, and The New York Times is very, very optimistic:

In late 2008, shortly after he had helped pull Iraq back from the brink of catastrophe, Gen. David H. Petraeus prepared to turn to that other American war.  “I’ve always said that Afghanistan would be the tougher fight,” General Petraeus said at the time.

Now the burden falls to him, at perhaps the decisive moment in President Obama’s campaign to reverse the deteriorating situation on the ground here and regain the momentum in this nine-year-old war. In many ways, General Petraeus is being summoned to Afghanistan at a moment similar to the one he faced three years ago in Iraq, when the situation seemed hopeless to a growing number of Americans and their elected representatives as well.

But there is a crucial difference: In Iraq, General Petraeus was called in to reverse a failed strategy put in place by previous commanders. In Afghanistan, General Petraeus was instrumental in developing and executing the strategy in partnership with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who carried it out on the ground. Now General Petraeus will be directly responsible for its success or failure, risking the reputation he built in Iraq.

General Petraeus, 57, brings an extraordinary set of skills to his new job: a Boy Scout’s charm, penetrating intelligence and a ferocious will to succeed. At ease with the press and the public, and an adept negotiator, General Petraeus will probably distinguish himself from his predecessor with the political skills that carried him through the most difficult months of the counteroffensive in Iraq known as the surge.

Comments Off

By Joshua, June 22, 2010 1:59 am

First, The New York Times reports the non-story of allegedly untold mineral riches in Afghanistan, buying the Pentagon war propaganda hook, line and sinker (NYT wasn’t the only ones).  Now, an inflammatory piece the other way:

U.S. Said to Fund Afghan Warlords to Protect Convoys

American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries, according to the results of a Congressional investigation released Monday. The investigation, begun last year by the House Subcommittee for National Security, found that money given to these Afghan warlords often amounts to little more than mafia-style protection payments, with some NATO convoys that refused to pay the warlords coming under attack.

The subcommittee, led by Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, also uncovered evidence suggesting that American taxpayer money is making its way to the Taliban. Several trucking company supervisors told investigators that they believed the gunmen they hired to escort their convoys bribed the Taliban not to attack.

The warlords who are paid with American money, the investigators said, are undermining the legitimate Afghan government that Americans soldiers and Marines are struggling to build, and will most likely threaten the government long after the Americans and NATO leave.  The source of the taxpayer money is a $2.1 billion contract called Host Nation Trucking, which pays for the movement of food and supplies to some 200 American bases across this arid, mountainous country, which in many places has no paved roads.

The 79-page report, entitled “Warlord Inc.,” paints an anarchic picture of contemporary Afghanistan, with the country’s major highways being controlled by groups of freelance gunmen who answer to no one — and who are being paid for by the United States.

One might think that using the terms “American taxpayer money” and “mafia-style” is over-compensating for using the terms “Saudi Arabia of lithium” and “distract from generations of war” in their war propaganda piece of June 13, 2010.

Comments (2)

By Joshua, June 21, 2010 3:01 am

Presented by The New York Times as a major event, a potential turning point in the Afghanistan War, the story has virtually disappeared from the news.  Was it a mirage?

Some say the story was war propaganda:

Reading this week’s New York Times headline — “U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan” — many probably wondered how this information was being presented as “news” in 2010. After all, humanity has long been aware of the country’s vast natural resources. As Mother Jones magazine’s James Ridgeway said after recalling past public accounts of the ore deposits, “This ‘discovery’ in fact is ancient history tracing back to the times of Marco Polo.”…

… Now, under President Obama, we get leaked Pentagon memos cheerily promising that Afghanistan will become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium” and generals touting the minerals’ “stunning potential” — the implication being that America is morally obligated to exploit such potential through armed occupation.

The Guardian reports that the mineral deposit is worth 3 trillion, not just a paltry 1 trillion:

Afghanistan’s untapped mineral wealth is worth at least $3tn – triple a US estimate made this week – according to the government’s top mining official. 

They also suggest war propaganda:

Geologists have known for decades that Afghanistan has vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and other prized minerals, but a US briefing this week put a startling$1tn price tag on the reserves. Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani said today that he had seen geological assessments and industry estimates that the minerals were worth at least $3tn.Critics of the war questioned why the country’s mineral wealth was being promoted at a time when violence was on the rise and the international coalition was under pressure to prove its counterinsurgency strategy was working. US officials argued that if Afghanistan was seen to have a bright economic future, it could help convince people that securing the country was worth the fight. It could also give Afghans hope, they said.

Reportedly, Afghan President Karzai gave “priority” to Japan to develop the minerals:

During an appearance at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, Karzai focused on his country’s mineral deposits. He pointed to Japan’s status as Afghanistan’s second-biggest donor, and reasoned that Japan should enjoy special access to Afghan resources with estimated values that range from $1-3 trillion dollars.  “Morally, Afghanistan should give access as a priority to those countries that have helped Afghanistan massively in the past few years,” Karzai told the institute.  “What . . . we have to reciprocate with is this opportunity of mineral resources, that we must return at the goodwill of the Japanese people by giving Japan priority to come and explore and extract,” Karzai said.

If it’s U.S. war propaganda, then the Canadian press has bought into it, too.  Note the tone of this Montreal Gazette piece on “Golden Opportunities”:

A landlocked country the size of Manitoba or Texas, with nothing but rocks to fight over, turns out to be a treasure house of minerals. The initial conservative estimate is that Afghanistan has $420 billion of iron deposits, $275 billion of copper, $50 billion of cobalt, and $25 billion of gold. If the $3 trillion estimate proves out, there could be more than $1.2 trillion of iron alone, more than the size of the initial estimate and nearly equivalent to the GDP of Canada, one of the richest countries in the world. And our wealth derives precisely from our abundance of natural resources -including the very minerals discovered in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is rich. Who knew? Well, it seems the Soviets had some inkling during their occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, and U.S. geologists stumbled across some of their charts and data, but have only recently put all the pieces of the mineral deposits together…

Who knew, indeed?  The story seems suspicious, and considering that not much more has been reported on the topic from the U.S. government, it could very well be a piece of war propaganda designed to bolster U.S. business and ordinary citizen support for the war that never seems to end. 

How could the Soviets, whos spent 10 years fighting in Afghanistan, not know about this?  This could be read as post-Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda: the USSR was too dumb to know they were sitting on 1-3 trillion dollars worth of minerals.  Does this sound right to you?  The USSR government was many things, but stupid is not one of them. 

For a good history on the “mineral deposit riches in Afghanistan” story, see The Atlantic :

…a simple Google search identifies any number of previous stories with similar details.  “The Bush Administration concluded in 2007 that Afghanistan was potentially sitting on a goldmine of mineral resources and that this fact ought to become a central point of U.S. policy in bolstering the government.”  The Soviets knew this in 1985, as a 2002 history of the region’s economy shows…

The way in which the story was presented — with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less — and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.

The Obama administration and the military know that a page-one, throat-clearing New York Times story will get instant worldwide attention. The story is accurate, but the news is not that new; let’s think a bit harder about the context.

True story, truly war propaganda.

Comments (14)

By Joshua, June 21, 2010 2:32 am

Toothy condom invented, has to be seen to be believed:

South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.  “She looked at me and said, ‘If only I had teeth down there,’” recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. “I promised her I’d do something to help people like her one day.” Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born.  Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said. Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.  “It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it’s on,” she said. “If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter… however, it doesn’t break the skin, and there’s no danger of fluid exposure.”

Ehlers said she sold her house and car to launch the project, and she planned to distribute 30,000 free devices under supervision during the World Cup period.  “I consulted engineers, gynecologists and psychologists to help in the design and make sure it was safe,” she said.

After the trial period, they’ll be available for about $2 a piece. She hopes the women will report back to her.

“The ideal situation would be for a woman to wear this when she’s going out on some kind of blind date … or to an area she’s not comfortable with,” she said.

Here it is:  THE MANGLER.

Comments Off

By Joshua, June 14, 2010 3:33 am

Or, it may escalate it, as I’m sure the Taliban would like to get control of it:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.  An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.  “There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

This could be major news or, if it turns out to be les than expected, not much news at all.  I don’t know of a similar story: untapped mineral deposits substantially altering war.  Some things about it are suspicious.  How did the Soviets not find it in 10 years of war?  How did no one else in Afghanistan but the Americans find it?  If the Chinese are so interested in mining Afghanistan, how did they not find it earlier?

Imagine the future, if this turns out to be true: this is the biggest “mineral rush” in the history of the world, in a time of intense warfare, in an undemocratic country with an enemy such as the Taliban determined to stick it out for as long as it takes.  Even if mines could be made, the Taliban, if they don’t control the country, will be sure to target the mines in their attacks.  Karzai could be sitting on the world’s largest battery-producing empire in a time when batteries are becoming the New Oil.

Continue reading '1 Trillion Dollars Worth of Minerals in Afghanistan May Turn Tide of War'»