What about nuclear energy on the “ring of fire”? Fukushima is still screwed. A review of American nuclear reactors on the ring of fire will be completed in July.

What about a story of a historic trip? An elected official who refuses to give up is married to an astronaut. That astronaut was part of the second to last NASA space shuttle mission.

What about the arrest of a man who was an international fugitive for 16 years? A man who is accused of murdering 8,000 plus Muslim boys and men in Serbia will be tried in the Hague.

What about economic Deja Vu? the US housing values and employment rates? Both are falling. So much so that the US could be heading into the second drop of a double-dip recession.

What about news regarding immigration reform? New York state has withdrawn from Secure Communities Immigration Enforcement Program, Arizona’s law that outlines strict punishments for companies that hire undocumented immigrants is upheld in the US Supreme Court and Maryland passed it’s own Dream Act.

What about climate volatility? Tornadoes have been wreaking some considerable havoc in areas where they are common and uncommon. Tornado alley Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama and the focus of the worst damage so far is Joplin, Missouri destroyed and 134 dead. 4 dead in Massachusetts while there were tornado watches in Minneapolis, New York and New Jersey. Whereas federal funding for disaster relief for Americans is usually a given, Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader says that relief efforts won’t be funded unless we cut some other government spending. [Note: This is the same cynical legislative brinkmanship the GOP has used with unemployment benefit extensions in past years and now raising the debt ceiling.] Meanwhile, as it seems to go with energy and dealing with climate realities, we are behind.

With regards to climate responsive civil engineering and energy, who is doing things we should be emulating? As far as building communities near flood prone river basins and deltas, the Dutch seem to be on the leading edge:

Complementing Room for the River are two corollary policies: “Retain, Store, Drain” and “Living With Water.” They encourage neighborhoods to retain water where it falls, using cisterns, green roofs and flood-able parks. Living With Water demands that urban planners and water managers create communities wherein water is a cherished asset and not something to fear and keep out of sight.

These efforts have not come without controversy. The Netherlands is the world’s third-most-densely populated country. Intensive land use is common. Forgoing hard-won reclaimed land is politically difficult. But the disastrous floods of the ’90s provided fertile political ground to start a process involving all stakeholders: citizens, businesses and local governments.

via Dutch create a diversion – Times Union.

In Germany, huge projects are underway to replace nuclear energy with wind and solar (distributed panels and solar farms).

And oh yea, we are fighting 3 wars in 4 countries! Memorial Day comes and goes and so does our willingness to focus on the wars they fight on our behalf. We are due to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan in July 2011. What happens when troops come home? In addition to an atrophied job market, due to increased protective equipment for soldiers, more of our veterans are returning with serious brain injuries. In Libya, NATO (aka the US, UK and friends) has extended the campaign beyond the days and weeks Obama promised. We still haven’t placed any troops in the country, and Gaddafi is hemorrhaging ministers and top commanders, but has maintained a stalemate throughout. The NATO position:

NATO officials say their decision to keep the rebels at arm’s length was deliberate.

“For us, it’s all about not wanting to contravene or jeopardize the U.N. mandate that we’re following,” said a NATO official in the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, speaking under NATO ground rules that he not be named. The U.N. resolution authorizing military action in Libya speaks only of protecting civilians from attacks by Gaddafi’s forces, he said.

“We cannot be [the rebels’] air power,” the official said. “This was a popular public uprising, and it has to unfold that way, in a natural way. It’s not for us to do any more in terms of support.”

via Libyan rebels in a fight they don’t control – The Washington Post.

Meanwhile Pakistan’s ISI and military continue to be infiltrated by elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda even as the government continues to cooperate with our campaign in that region and continues their own diplomatic efforts.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nations military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

Johnson is a 1979 graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, where King graduated in 1948. He also attended school with King’s son, Martin Luther King III, and was privy to the elder King’s speaking engagements there.

via Defense.gov News Article: King Might Understand Today’s Wars, Pentagon Lawyer Says.

there’s more

Johnson said King criticized those who are compassionate by proxy, noting the civil rights leader told the audience in Memphis that night, “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’”

Johnson compared today’s troops to the Samaritan, who chose to help instead of taking an easier path.

“I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes,” Johnson said.

Volunteers in today’s military, he said, “have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.

“Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness — the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968,” Johnson told the audience.

Apparently, non-violent civil disobedience means wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. (Preach it, preach it) God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. (Amen) The God that I worship has a way of saying, “Don’t play with me.” (Yes) He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, “Don’t play with me, Israel. Don’t play with me, Babylon. (Yes) Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.” (Yes) And that can happen to America. (Yes) Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening. And we have perverted the drum major instinct.

But let me rush on to my conclusion, because I want you to see what Jesus was really saying. What was the answer that Jesus gave these men? It’s very interesting. One would have thought that Jesus would have condemned them. One would have thought that Jesus would have said, “You are out of your place. You are selfish. Why would you raise such a question?”

But that isn’t what Jesus did; he did something altogether different. He said in substance, “Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you’re going to be my disciple, you must be.” But he reordered priorities. And he said, “Yes, don’t give up this instinct. It’s a good instinct if you use it right. (Yes) It’s a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. (Amen) I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do.”

And he transformed the situation by giving a new definition of greatness. And you know how he said it? He said, “Now brethren, I can’t give you greatness. And really, I can’t make you first.” This is what Jesus said to James and John. “You must earn it. True greatness comes not by favoritism, but by fitness. And the right hand and the left are not mine to give, they belong to those who are prepared.” (Amen)

And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That’s a new definition of greatness.

via The Drum Major Instinct – Martin Luther King.

Even more annoying/worrying thing about Johnson’s attempt to co-opt MLK as a supporter of wars years after his death, is that he is trying to Christianize the current war effort in the same breath.  When you hear about the leadership of government security contractors speaking in crusaders terms, Rumsfeld’s security updates for George W Bush prefaced with bible verses and a DOD attorney arguing that these wars are just in biblical terms shows a sense of self-delusion and/or fanaticism that should have us all wary of the primary actors in these wars.

Progress as measured by VPs 2004 to 2010 (c/o Blame it on the Voices)

The Jail at Camp Taji north of Baghdad holds 3,000 inmates, mostly “low level insurgents”, the military said.

Only a small number of inmates have been convicted of a crime with most detained because of Iraqi government-issued arrest warrants.

[...]

The prison in Camp Taji was opened in 2008.

[...]

The US military controls one other prison in Iraq, while all others including the notorious Abu Ghraib have been handed over to the Iraqis.

via BBC News – US hands over prison to the government of Iraq.

Tony Blair’s widely panned appearance at last week’s Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war reminded the world about the former British prime minister’s role in that lethal fiasco. Like many of the Iraq war’s instigators here in the United States, Blair has gotten a free pass while flaunting his lack of remorse. Indeed, the failure to hold him accountable resulted in his appointment as the special envoy of the “Mideast Quartet” in June 2007,  charged with reviving the peace process on behalf of its members — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and the Russian Federation.
[...]
During Blair’s long-winded justification of his actions, he compared the current threat from Iran’s nuclear program with the supposed threat from Iraq’s supposed WMD arsenal no fewer than 58 times. “We face the same problem about Iran today,” he said — a call to war that sounded weirdly discordant coming from a man committed to encouraging peaceful negotiation.

via Joe Conason – Did Tony Blair blow it as Mideast envoy? – Salon.com.

Tony Blair as Mideast Peace Envoy is a ridiculous position for someone who either grossly miscalculated  or lied through his teeth to magnify the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the rest of the world. At this point, all that matters is that Tony Blair is the absolute wrong choice. Conason captures the worst thing about Blair’s inquiry appearance: “We face the same problem about Iran today,”.

As he vociferously defends his decision to lead his nation into a costly invasion of Iraq Blair’s belief that 2010 Iran is the “same problem” as 2003 Iraq means that he believes we should attempt to bomb and bribe them into a functioning Democracy as well. Not the best mindset for a peace convoy.

I guess my sense is that Gore opposed the Iraq war in part out of bitterness. If you look at Gore’s record – and at TNR, I was hardly unaware of it – it was full of extreme vigilance about Saddam, willingness to use military force for moral ends (as in Bosnia), and completely conventional neo-con views on the Middle East. I can absolutely see him going to war against Saddam if goaded sufficiently. Maybe he would have been persuaded by the intelligence that we didn’t actually have the goods on WMDs; maybe his hawkishness would have waned in office as it did in opposition. But knowing Gore, I stick with my point. In office, I suspect he would have been much closer to my position on invasion at the time than he was.

via Dissent Of The Day – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

A truly baffling conclusion. Does Sullivan believe that a Gore Administration would have:

• trusted intelligence that even Bush’s Secretary of State called shaky at best
• ignored Ambassador Joe Wilson’s debunking of yellow cake sales
• sought to smear and expose Valerie Plame as a CIA operative
• deemed an occupation of Iraq as trustworthy
• told us a war in Iraq would be quick and inexpensive.
• reacted more favorable to gamed national security briefings with religious quotes
• adopted a neo-con centered “Gore doctrine”
• ignored the staggering diplomatic, human and financial costs of two perpetual, unilateral military occupations in two different countries
• disregarded a nation spiraling into debt as nations do when they fight wars
• made Vice President Joe Lieberman de facto Commander in Chief

I highly doubt it. And when Sullivan says a post 9/11 Gore would have sought to attackIraq, he ignores that all these things were done by the Bush Administration leading up to the Iraq war being engaged at the same time and detriment to the war in Afghanistan. The TNR characterization of Gore’s public opposition to the George W. Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, in his own words on September 23, 2002.

The Course of Action: The War on Terrorism, First

To begin with – to put first things first – I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.

via Event Archive: Al Gore – Commonwealth Club.

Gore, and President Clinton were constantly monitoring Saddam, but he wasn’t advocating prioritizing a unilateral invasion of Iraq over dealing with the terrorist group Al Qaeda. The “conventional neo-con view” was built around the central tenets of the Bush Doctrine: unitary executive, unilateral preemptive war and exporting democracy through military occupation. Gore’s remarks specifically speak out against these three things. This is not a disagreement based on bitterness.  He may have been sour grapes, but he was dead on with his substantive rejection of the Bush Doctrine plan for war. This is the position Sullivan was close to in 2002/2003.

The Gore is just sour grapes meme sounds like classic Bush White House messaging circa 2002. Many liberals as well as almost all conservatives ate it up. They were wrong. Gore is arguing from an executive “if I were in charge of this country” mindset. The main question Gore tried to answer “At What Cost”. TNR and Sullivan scoffed, Bolton style, at the worth of international opinion in determining our allies willingness to follow the Bush Doctrine.

But surely Gore also has an obligation to share his reasons for believing that war with Iraq will “severely damage” the war on terrorism. The argument, after all, is not self-evident: Germany, the U.S. ally most vocally opposed to attacking Iraq, has simultaneously intensified its assistance in the war on terrorism–signaling that it will take over the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In fact, Gore provides no evidence to support his claim. And thus he fails the very evidentiary standard that he calls on Bush to meet.

via Speechless | The New Republic.

Its odd that these principled folks on the TNR editorial board and a true conservative like Sullivan all ignored the part of Gore’s speech where he outlined a key reason the war in Iraq would damage the war on terrorism. Its something a good executive would think about. Cost. Gore clearly outlined that in point four of five high key differences between the invasion of 1991 vs. Bush’s proposed invasion in 2002.

Fourth, the coalition assembled in 1991 paid all of the significant costs of the war, while this time, the American taxpayers will be asked to shoulder hundreds of billions of dollars in costs on our own.

[...]

much as we manage to squander in one year’s time the largest budget surpluses in history and convert them into massive fiscal deficits.

Gore shared a list of key reason with the TNR editors, Sullivan and anyone who would actually listen. Cost. Nothing costs a nation more money and blood than war. We were already in the middle of one war, albeit internationally supported. Gore made the simple case: if we actually go to war in Iraq, we will undergo that war on our own and may give European nations a way out of the war in Afghanistan.

What would have remained the same? Tony Blair would have supported an invasion of Iraq on the same cooked up, flimsy intelligence. He has said as much then and now, so I take him at his word. Sullivan voted Bush vs Gore on personality, he admits, while embracing a record of professional failures versus Gore’s career political record as a centrist Democratic legislator and Vice President. That’s fine. Sullivan was had. But he wasn’t had by Bush’s jocular rhetoric. He was had by his own personal bias against anything Clinton/Gore. TNR and Sullivan established a simple equation to justify thei: If a bad guy has a scent of WMD’s, we must go to war. This is a false choice.

Sullivan said that Gore’s address on 9/23/2002 speech proved Gore was just objecting out of bitterness:

[Gore] is a pure opportunist, with no consistency in his political views on foreign or domestic policy. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get him power or attention or votes. How else to explain his sudden U-turn on Iraq? Two years ago, he was demanding that “Saddam must go“. Seven months ago, he was calling for a “final reckoning” with Iraq, a state that was a “virulent threat in a class by itself.” Now, with Saddam far closer to weapons of mass destruction, Gore is happy to see Saddam stay in place.

via www.AndrewSullivan.com – Daily Dish.

When did Gore say a “final reckoning”? Before the CFR, seven months earlier with the following caveats regarding attacking Iraq.

So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit. And wishful thinking based on best-case scenarios or excessively literal transfers of recent experience to different conditions would be a recipe for disaster.

But still, the question remains – what next? Is Iran under the hard-liners less of a proliferation threat than Iraq? Or less involved with terrorism? If anything, Iran is at this moment a much more dangerous challenge in each area than Iraq. Iran is flight-testing longer range rockets. Iran has loaded up at least one merchant ship with a cargo of death for Israel.

The vast majority of the Iranian people seem to disagree with the policies and actions of the small group of mullahs now in control of their military and intelligence apparatus. We have to deal with that nation’s actions as they take place. In the process, however, we should find ways to encourage the majority who obviously wish to develop a more constructive relationship with us.

via A Commentary on the War Against Terror: Our Larger Tasks – Council on Foreign Relations.

Gore did say that “Saddam must go”. He regretted that Saddam was not removed from power during or after Desert Storm.  Gore was not happy to see Saddam stay in place. Gore even re-voiced his support for repeated bombing of Saddam’s military interests to cripple his war time capability. But to say he would have launched a full scale war while waging another war in Afghanistan is a dishonest oversimplification of his September 2002 position.  Gore wasn’t opposed to aggression against Saddam, he was opposed to a full invasion and occupation of Iraq while we fought a war in Afghanistan which required an executive to build an international coalition to support comprehensive anti-terrorism strategies.

He was opposed to launching headlong into a war in the circumstances of 2002. It became increasingly evident hearing the rhetoric coming from the Bush Administration they wanted war in Iraq regardless of how dangerous Saddam really was and how important it was to  keep our military and intelligence operations focused on Iraq Afghanistan.

Even as Sullivan cheers the Green Revolution today, he ignores the fact that Gore had some basic understanding of the nuanced and strained relationship between the Iranian Mullahs and its majority Shiite populace further support  2002 Gore having an understanding that there were dire consequences if we inserted the U.S. between Saddam, the Iranian Mullahs and their citizenries as the occupier of Iraq. The Bush Administration said it would be cheap and quick. Gore understood an Iraq invasion would necessarily mean more than just getting the bad guys. Bush and his Administration did not. The Bush Administration said we will win hearts and minds of Muslims throughout the world by bombing two predominantly Muslim countries.

Gore may have been bitter, but he laid out both his prerequisites for congressional approval of a full scale armed conflict with Iraq and later his case against the Bush Administrations invasion of Iraq in clear terms. He was right in standard and in opposition. It was the bitter taste from Gore’s public personality that led Sullivan and TNR to try and wash it down with a nice long drink of Crawford Cowboy Kool-Aid. They were wrong to support Iraq and were back patting each other in the middle of a massive political pro-Bush group think.

Sometimes a little bitterness is what we need.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

via ATTACKERMAN » Drone Hack? $26. American Arrogance? Priceless.

If it’s computerized, there is a hack for it. The fact that the Pentagon  assumed that the locals wouldn’t be able to figure that out or rather decided that’s a fair explanation for the down link hack is ridiculous. We can’t just buy a new fangled gadget from a defense contractor to solve our problems. We need to be able to improve our own tech, and I’m not sure if it is really being done. Is there a way the Pentagon can hack the drones 10 output video feeds with noise (various dummy feeds) to throw off eavesdroppers before we are able to install feed encryption?

The WSJ article Ackerman sourced also details how the U.S. accuses Iran of supporting the dissemination of this hack. So what. We know Iran wants to support Shiite opposition forces in Iraq. Another Pentagon PR gem:

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas.

via Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones – WSJ.com.

This illuminates two kinds of hacks. The “Cyber war” has always been here. Remember the Navajo Code Talker Marines? That was a hack we used in WW II. A good proactive hack.

Today, in Iraq, when IEDs were shredding vehicles, our soldiers were forced to hack their transports by up-armoring  them with whatever metal they could find and armor paid for by their families back home. This is not a good hack, we are being out hacked. On top of that, we didn’t secure Iraq Army munitions at the beginning of the occupation, most of them walked away and are being rigged into this ever deadly, decades old hack that we can’t neutralize.

Either way, this is how wars are lost. Adversaries will find ways to neutralize our seemingly boundless power and funding for armed conflict with hacks. If we don’t evolve our war machinery, there will be hacks for them faster them faster than we can counter-hack. This is how war works, but this arrogance or tech malpractice is remnants of Rumsfeld’s Doctrine of “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want”. Heck of a job.

Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP

LONDON (AFP) – Tony Blair’s admission that Britain would have backed the Iraq war even if he knew it did not have weapons of mass destruction sparked outrage Sunday and calls for his prosecution for war crimes.
[...]
Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix added: “The war was sold on the WMD, and now you feel, or hear that it was only a question of deployment of arguments, as he said, it sounds a bit like a fig leaf that was held up.”

via Blair Iraq war admission sparks fresh outrage – Yahoo! News.

Blair didn’t just “back” the Iraq War, he went all in he helped wage the Iraq War.

The decision to wage war in Iraq shouldn’t have been contingent only on the question of whether Saddam Hussein was a bad guy (with or our without WMD), he most certainly was. The decision to go to war should have been contingent upon whether unseating Hussein and nation building Iraq was a necessity to protect the domestic sovereignty and citizens of the US, UK and their allies.

We know now, and many of us knew then, that it wasn’t. Blair is either stupid or dishonest.

An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam’s weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

[...]

“But the provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong. In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard a conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.

“Indeed, in the intelligence analyst’s footnote to the report, it was flagged up that part of the report probably describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. They verifiably did not exist.

“The footnote said it in black and white ink. Despite this glaring factual inaccuracy, which under normal circumstances would have caused the reliability of the intelligence to be seriously questioned, the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier.”

via 45-minute WMD claim ‘may have come from an Iraqi taxi driver’ | Politics | guardian.co.uk.

ugh.