Entropy Advances

Sometimes There's Nothing You Can Do; Sometimes It All Just Falls Apart


Nuclear Secrets for Sale
So BradBlog and the Sunday Times in jolly old England have been pushing a fairly explosive, no pun intended, story on nuclear proliferation.

It seems that a former translator working on our intercepts from Turkey stumbled on something she wasn't supposed to know; that high ranking US government reps in the Bush administration were selling out our nuclear secrets -- to Turkey, and through them, to half the Islamic world.

The paper now reports that they are able to corroborate an apparent FBI cover-up of documents detailing an investigation of the theft and sale of nuclear secrets to agents working for Turkey and Israel, who in turn shared the secrets with Pakistan, who in turn may have shared those secrets with Iran, North Korea, Libya, and possibly even al-Qaeda.

As The BRAD BLOG reported along with the Times two weeks ago, the operation also includes allegations that high-ranking U.S. officials --- such as Marc Grossman, a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, who served as the #3 official in the State Department under Colin Powell and Richard Armitage from 2001 to 2005 --- were involved in the sale of those secrets and may have accepted pay-offs from agents in the black market network in the bargain.

Naturally, the informant in question is under a gag order to prevent her from spilling her guts on precisely who in the Bush administration committed bald-faced treason.

We've also just spoken to Edmonds, who has been under an unprecedented 5-year-long gag order by the U.S. Department of Justice. The DoJ has threatened Edmonds with prosecution under the so-called "State Secrets Privilege." The threat of prison has kept her from speaking publicly about details related to the case, which she claims to have heard while translating wiretaps for the FBI in 2001 and 2002. She has spent many years encouraging members of Congress to hold hearings and a public investigation into the case. Despite public support from senators such as Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and a promise for investigations from members of Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) office, who have been briefed on the details, no such investigation has been carried out to date.

It gets even better of course. It turns out that Valerie Plame was betrayed yet again by the Bush administration, and our counter-proliferation efforts shot in the back.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to [Pakistan's] ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the [American Turkish Council].

Meanwhile, the American media, unlike some blogs and the British papers, is eerily silent on this whole sordid mess.

In response to that story, the top newspapers from Turkey to Pakistan to India to Israel picked up on the report. But in the United States, incredibly enough, absolutely nothing. Not a single major American media outlet covered the explosive and disturbing allegations.

Ahh, the American press. How little we can rely upon them.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame has published an op-ed on the subject that I need to read. Though from what I've seen it didn't get much play either.

Source: The BRAD BLOG

NATO Staff Asserts Right to Use Nukes As First-Strike
Cold War all over again. Sigh.

The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

In other words, prominent NATO officials believe that nuclear war is an acceptable tactic in response to terrorism, global warming, regional conflicts and humanitarian crises.

Just great.

Source: The Guardian

What's Good for the Goose...
Putin's Russia also recently stated its willingness to blow the living daylights out of the landscape on rather spurious justification.

Russia's military chief of staff said Saturday that Moscow could use nuclear weapons in preventive strikes to protect itself and its allies, the latest aggressive remarks from increasingly assertive Russian authorities.

Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky's comment did not mark a policy shift, military analysts said. Amid disputes with the West over security issues, it may have been meant as a warning that Russia is prepared to use its nuclear might.

"We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to clearly understand ... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons," Baluyevsky said at a military conference in a remark broadcast on state-run cable channel Vesti-24.

...

The military doctrine adopted in 2000 says Russia may use nuclear weapons to counter a nuclear attack on Russia or an ally, or a large-scale conventional attack that poses a critical risk to Russia's security.

Note that the conventional attack doesn't have to be on Russia, or Russia's allies... or anything in particular really. That's a lot of wiggle room for a nuclear holocaust, to my mind.

Source: Raw Story

Bush is the New Hoover
Only without the compassion and human decency.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A shock U.S. interest rate cut failed to halt a stock market rout on Tuesday as fears of a U.S. recession forced policymakers in Europe and Japan to issue rapid reassurances about the health of their economies.

The Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point to 3.5 percent, its biggest in more than 23 years. But markets paused only momentarily before the selling wave renewed as investors seem fixated on the idea that the U.S. will drag the world economy down.

...

Outside North America, politicians and central bankers said the market selloff looked excessive. But they had their work cut out to convince as people like billionaire investor George Soros, who said the world faced a financial crisis worse than any since World War Two.

Meanwhile, the Europeans are already looking to a future where they can't rely on the United States to exist as a viable economic entity:

The message sounded more strident in Europe than Japan but the common theme was: don't panic.

"There are no signs of a recession in Germany and that's also the case for Europe," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

In an interview with German TV to be broadcast later, she called Europe an "anchor of stability" in the world.

France sought to put a possible recession in the United States into perspective, saying Europe trades just as much with other parts of the world, above all with the countries of the euro zone and 27-country European Union.

"Even if the United States goes into recession ... it's not a tragedy in itself," Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said.

She and other European finance ministers meeting in Brussels said Europe's economy was fundamentally sound and should in no way be grouped with the U.S. economy, hit by a housing slump and a debt default crisis in the subprime mortgage market.

"We feel comfortable with our economic situation at the moment. The economic situation in Europe seems to be uncoupled from the situation in the U.S.," said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs meetings of euro zone finance ministers and acts as their chief spokesman.

Honestly, the fact that the perennially ossified EU, with its constant bickering and infighting, can do this to us is a sign of just how badly Bush runs the US Government. It reminds me of the famous Churchill quote on democracy; the EU can only seem like an idyllic paradise if you live in hell.

Source: Reuters

Meanwhile, In the Festering Wound That is Iraq
The other day on the Daily Show, Fareed Zakaria, strike-breaking scum that he is appearing on a show with a picket against it, said something that really summed up US foreign policy to me brilliantly, in a crystal-clear, concise phrase that could really be the substitute for a lot of classwork in poli-sci at the undergrad level:

"We like Democracy in strategically irrelevant countries." -- Fareed Zakaria

How can someone say something that bright one moment, and this dumb the next?

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

Nevermind the obvious logical problem with that statement, that a war has largely ended because we're mired inside of it; what planet is this guy on? Would he care for a vacation package to sunny downtown Baghdad, since he's so sure the war is over?

As Yglesisas notes while discussing the ever-improving tactics of the insurgency:

Obviously, though, this improvement in the tactics and doctrine of anti-American fighters in Iraq can't be a big deal since the war is largely over. If the war were still happening, this kind of thing might illustrate the illusory nature of tactical improvements in the face of a bleak strategic situation. But since the war is "largely" over already there's probably no problem here.

Yeah. It's all sunshine and lollipops over there. Yglesias' post comes on the heels of the news that the Army's latest, greatest, most bomb resistant troop transport technology, designed to put us ahead of the insurgents in the IED war, has been beaten for the first time.

What's so special about these new vehicles, called MRAPs, you ask?

The vehicles have distinctive, armored V-shaped hulls that are designed to deflect the force of the explosion from roadside bombs out and away from the vehicle, sparing the occupants in the compartment.

The underbody sits about 36 inches off the ground, higher than the Humvees that have proved susceptible to roadside bombs despite the additional armor added to many of them in combat zones.

The vehicles are much bigger than Humvees, standing 12 feet high, weighing up to 18 tons, and carrying 6 to 10 soldiers, depending on the model. There are more than 1,500 of them in Iraq now, and the military plans to purchase more than 15,000 of them at a cost of $22.4 billion.

Apparently the geniuses at the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a single design, so they're buying basically anything, from any contractor, that is thrown at them claiming to solve this problem. See this Wikipedia article on the sheer variety of vehicles they're trying out now under the MRAP banner.

The anti-armor weapon that took it out? Basically the same thing Timothy McVeigh utilized: a fertilizer bomb.

Several vehicles in the convoy had already passed over the same spot, but failed to set off what officers say they was a deeply buried, homemade bomb, which the military calls an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., made from about 300 pounds of fertilizer and set off with a pressure device.

We are well and truly hosed, trying to fight an insurgency campaign with technology. You can't win; it's the fundamental nature of the universe that order loses out to degeneracy, entropy increases, and it all falls apart. It will always be easier to destroy than to create; you can't fight that, it's not an ethos, it's physical reality. The only way to build and protect a society is to keep it cohesive and safe from the inside out, and fight a never-ending war, one that ultimately all life is doomed to lose, against the ravages of time.

Ultimately, it will all just fall apart. It's up to us to slow the decay, to use the time we've been given, and lately, we've been miserable failures.

Sources: The New York Times
Matthew Yglesias
Wikipedia