Miscellanea

Some good articles I read over the summer but never got around to mentioning in a post. To highlight: I found the article on Zarqawi and "Racist Like Me" to be particularly good.

Articles:

• "Is there a Science Crisis? Maybe Not", from The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July


• "Afghan President Describes Militias as the Top Threat", from the New York Times, 12 July


• "Doubts on Informant Deleted in Senate Text", from the New York Times, 13 July


• "Zarqawi's Journey: From Dropout to Prisoner to an Insurgent Leader in Iraq", from the New York Times, 13 July


• "Early Steps, Maybe, Toward a Democracy in Iraq", from the New York Times, 27 July


• "Racist Like Me - Why am I the only honest bigot?", from Slate magazine, 11 August


• "U.S. Report Turns Focus to Greenhouse Gases", from the New York Times, 26 August


• "Afghan voting number puzzle", from BBC News, 27 August

Unfortunately, most of the articles from the New York Times website are now viewable in full only after paying a fee. (Of course, Lexis-Nexis is also an option for some people.)

You can get an iPod (new 20GB or mini) or a $250 gift-certificate to the iTunes Music Store for free.

If you are interested, please give me a referral by going to the following link: http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=8498800.

There is a catch. But let me say I usually doubt these sorts of things are true. To be honest, I'm not certain I will really get an iPod out of this. But I am 99% certain it won't cost me any money to try.

Let me explain.

First, you may want to read an article from Wired magazine about the whole system. Apparently it is some experiemental advertising technique, and not a scam.

Second, here is the process:

1. Create an account by following my referral link. Use a valid email because you will need to receive the confirmation message. Also, no PO boxes, and only one account per household.


2. Sign up for just one of the offers. For instance, I signed up for the 50-day AOL trial since I trust they are sincere in saying I can cancel without any charge.


3. Wait a few days for the free iPod website to receive notice that you have signed up for the offer. You can then cancel the trial to avoid charges.


4. Get five more people to sign up with your referral link, just like you signed up with mine.


5. Receive a free iPod!

If you have any questions, please email me.

Neat that talk radio is happening in Iraq. Also, don't know if they're genuine or if they're representative, but most callers apparently advocate Sadam Hussein's execution and denounce the actions of insurgents as 'terrorism.'

Excerpts:

The callers have reached Iraq's first talk radio station, Radio Dijla, which opened in April and has been putting Iraqis' opinions directly on the air, mainlining democracy from a two-story villa in central Baghdad for 19 hours a day.

In all, about 15 private radio stations have sprung up since the American occupation began, but Dijla, Arabic for Tigris, is the first to serve only talk. The station is one of the most listened-to in Baghdad, according to its employees, a claim that appears to have merit, judging by its broad following....

The station receives an average of 185 calls an hour, far more than it can handle....

"Iraqi citizens have big problems, but nobody listens to them," said Haidar al-Ameen, 34, a businessman, who listens to Dijla while driving. "If I have no gun, there is no one who is going to listen to me. The government has no time to listen."

The station forces the government to make time. Local and federal officials come as guests and are grilled by listeners. The talk shows result in uncomfortable situations, which would have been unheard of in the time of Saddam Hussein, when government officials were royalty and ordinary citizens were mere supplicants who were easily ignored. ...

Beyond easing the frustrations of daily life, the station provides a real chance for Iraqis to talk publicly about politics for the first time in decades. Listeners' calls open a window onto the lives of Iraqis, whose opinions often go unheard in the frantic pace of bombings, kidnappings and armed uprisings. ...

The station was started with seed money from the Swedish government. Its founder, Ahmed al-Rakabi, the former chief of the American-financed Iraqi Media Network, was born in Prague in 1969, after his family was forced to leave Iraq to escape repression under Mr. Hussein. ...

"Let everyone talk," he said. "All of Iraqis in different lines must talk, must talk under sun, not in secret."

Looks like there is a little Taliban-style haven going on in the Anbar Province. Hopefully it doesn't spiral (hasn't spiraled?) out of control.

Excerpts:

Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. ... Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts - officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States - have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. ...

In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. ...

The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja marketplace for 50 cents. ...

In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids. ...

The militants' principal power center is a mosque in Falluja led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city.... But Mr. Janabi appears to have been working in alliance with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy War, that American intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to Al Qaeda....

Marine commanders at Camp Falluja, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States. Eventually, the Marine officers have said, American hopes of creating stability in Iraq will necessitate a new attack on the city, this time one that will not be halted before it can succeed. ...

Among militants in Falluja, there has been one point of agreement with the Americans - that many of the bombing raids have hit militant safe houses, and with pinpoint accuracy. A clue as to how this has been possible is given in the tapes of the beheadings of Mr. Mar'awi, the national guard commander, and of the Egyptian, a man in his mid-30's who identifies himself on the tape as Muhammad Fawazi. Both men confess to having planted electronic homing "chips" for the Americans. As they speak, the tapes show a man wearing a red-checkered kaffiyeh headdress holding a rectangular device, colored green and encased in clear plastic, about the size of a matchbox.

Hard-hitting piece from the editorial board of the New York Times revisiting Abu Ghraib in light of the recently released Army internal investigation and the Schlesinger report.

A complementary editorial, "Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Religious Bigotry", offers additional criticism over the Pentagon's handling of our very own crusader, Deputy Secretary of Defence for Intelligence General Boykin.

I sometimes imagine what our government would be like if it were run like a public company. I have a hard time imagining executives like Rumsfeld would be kept on after disasters and embarrassments like these.

Excerpts:

The Army's internal investigation, released yesterday, showed that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police officers - the administration's chosen culprits. ... Another report, from a civilian panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, offers the dedicated reader a dotted line from President Bush's decision to declare Iraq a front in the war against terror, to government lawyers finding ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, to Mr. Rumsfeld's bungled planning of the occupation and understaffing of the ground forces in Iraq, to the hideous events at Abu Ghraib prison.

This is all cast as "leadership failure" - the 21st-century version of the Nixonian "mistakes were made" evasion - that does not require even the mildest reprimand for Mr. Rumsfeld, who should have resigned over this disaster months ago. Direct condemnation is reserved for the men and women in the field....

Still, the dots are there, making it clear that the road to Abu Ghraib began well before the invasion of Iraq, when the administration created the category of "unlawful combatants...." Interrogators wanted to force these prisoners to talk in ways that are barred by American law and the Geneva Conventions, and on Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department lawyers produced the infamous treatise on how to construe torture as being legal.

In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized things like hooding prisoners, using dogs to terrify them, forcing them into "stress positions" for long periods, stripping them, shaving them and isolating them. ...

According to the report, American forces began mistreating prisoners at the outset of the war in Afghanistan. Interrogators and members of military intelligence were sent from Afghanistan to Iraq, and the harsh interrogations "migrated" with them. ... But in the strange logic of this report, that was not the fault of those who made the policies. ...

All these decisions were happening in a chaotic context. The Schlesinger reports said ... [i]nsufficient numbers of military police units were sent to Iraq in a disorganized fashion, many of them untrained reservists. ...

And that was a policy approved by Mr. Bush and designed by Mr. Rumsfeld, who wanted a lightning invasion by the sparest force possible, based on the ludicrous notion that Iraqis would not resist.

Excerpts from the second editorial:

It was stunning last fall, after the general's lapse into brimstone bigotry became public, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, far from disturbed, praised General Boykin for an "outstanding record" and kept him at the highly sensitive intelligence post during the inquiry. Now it is simply mind-boggling that Pentagon reports suggest the general may survive with only a reprimand for having failed to clear his remarks in advance.

General Boykin has to be removed from his current job. He has become a national embarrassment, not to mention a walking contradiction of President Bush's own policy statement that the fight against terror is bias-free and not a crusade against Islam.

Wow. Just go look at it. I don't know anything about astronomy, but this is a really cool picture.

The site where I found this, Astronomy Picture of the Day, is pretty cool, too.

Always need to separate the merits of a bill from its politics, but an interesting, dramatic proposal nonetheless. I look forward to following the debate.

Excerpts:

The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee [Pat Roberts of Kansas] said Sunday that he would propose legislation to break up the Central Intelligence Agency and divide its responsibilities among three new spy agencies. ...

According to a statement released by Mr. Roberts outlining his bill, the legislation would make these changes:

Establish the office of national intelligence director, who ... would have "complete budget and personnel authority, including hiring and firing authority," over the government's spy operations, including "the national intelligence collection agencies currently residing in the Department of Defense...." [which] include the National Security Agency....

Break up the C.I.A. into three parts: a National Clandestine Service, which would direct traditional human spy operations; an Office of National Assessments, which would be responsible for intelligence analysis; and an Office of Technical Support, which would be responsible for research and development projects. The new agencies would report to the national intelligence director....

"I expect a lot of debate, should be a lot of debate," Mr. Roberts said, adding that he was open to rethinking parts of his legislation. "It is not a tablet, you know, coming down from a mountain, written in stone."

Worrying problem, especially in regard to the unpaid internships on Capitol Hill. I'd say either these internships should be paid, or financial aid scholarships should provide pay for those who truly need it.

Excerpts:

Susan Lim, a 20-year-old Georgetown University student, is working 89 hours a week this summer: two part-time jobs and an unpaid internship offered through the Public Policy and International Affairs Program.

Her schedule - working for money as a clerical assistant and a summer school resident adviser and without pay as a researcher at the public policy program - is a sharp contrast to that of her Georgetown classmates. Many of them have parents who support them through unpaid summer internships, or they have qualified for paid internships because of experience as unpaid interns during high school. ...

[A]s internships rise in importance as critical milestones along the path to success, questions are emerging about whether they are creating a class system that discriminates against students from less affluent families who have to turn down unpaid internships to earn money for college expenses.

'It's something that really makes me nuts,' said Cokie Roberts, an ABC News correspondent who spoke out about the problem on Capitol Hill several weeks ago at a gathering of Congressional interns. 'By setting up unpaid internship programs, it seems to me that without completely recognizing it, it sets up a system where you are making it ever more difficult for people who don't have economic advantages to catch up.' ...

While half of internships nationwide are paid or have at least a small stipend, according to national surveys conducted by Vault, unpaid internships are concentrated in the most competitive fields, like politics, television and film. ...

And since Washington internships serve as a pipeline that brings policy makers into the nation's capital, some people fear that over the long term, internships will be another means, like the rising costs of college tuition, of squeezing voices from the working class and even the middle class out of high-level policy debates.

Troubling article. Here's to hoping the odds are worse than the experts claim. Here's to hoping the government gives antiproliferation more attention.

Excerpts:

If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in Times Square, the fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

It would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall (along with me and my building). The blast would partly destroy a much larger area, including the United Nations. On a weekday some 500,000 people would be killed. ...

[O]n Oct. 11, 2001, exactly a month after 9/11, aides told President Bush that a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City. ...

Dragonfire's report was wrong, but similar reports - that Al Qaeda has its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union - have regularly surfaced in the intelligence community, even though such a report has never been confirmed. We do know several troubling things: Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, "We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs."

Professor Allison offers a standing bet at 51-to-49 odds that, barring radical new antiproliferation steps, a terrorist nuclear strike will occur somewhere in the world in the next 10 years. ... William Perry, the former secretary of defense, says there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike within this decade - that is, in the next six years.

"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," Mr. Perry warns. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it." ...

But the White House has insisted on tackling the most peripheral elements of the W.M.D. threat, like Iraq, while largely ignoring the central threat, nuclear proliferation.

Analysis of the information obtained from the capture of Mohammed Khan last month. Unsurprisingly, it appears our progress in eliminating al-Qa'ida is not nearly so thorough or straightforward as the Bush administration would have us believe.

Excerpts:

Using computer records, e-mail addresses and documents seized after the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan last month in Pakistan, intelligence analysts say they are finding that Al Qaeda's upper ranks are being filled by lower-ranking members and more recent recruits. ...

While the findings may result in a significant intelligence coup for the Bush administration and its allies in Britain, they also create a far more complex picture of Al Qaeda's status than Mr. Bush presents on the campaign trail. For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood. ...

The new evidence suggests that Al Qaeda has retained some elements of its previous centralized command and communications structure, using computer experts like Mr. Khan to relay encrypted messages and directions from leaders to subordinates in countries like Britain, Turkey and Nigeria.

In the past, officials had a different view of Al Qaeda. After the American-led war in Afghanistan, most American counterterrorism analysts believed that the group had been dispersed and had been trying to re-form in a loosely affiliated collection of extremist groups

It appears that Al Qaeda is more resilient than was previously understood and has sought to find replacements for operational commanders like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad, all of whom have been captured. ...

It seems the Army is working to improve in regard to various shortcomings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall probably a good thing; while I hope we don't have any, future conflicts will likely look similar.

Excerpts:

In what officers describe as the most striking changes to basic training since the Vietnam era, soldiers whose specialties traditionally kept them far from the front - clerks, cooks, truck drivers and communications technicians - will undergo far more stressful training. The new training regimen includes additional time dodging real bullets, more opportunities to fire weapons, including heavy machine guns, and increasing the time spent practicing urban combat and hiking and sleeping in the field during the nine-week courses. ...

[W]ith the Army stretched today by long-term deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing percentage of new soldiers are in combat zones within 30 days of being assigned to a unit, Army officials say. Even those whose specialties are not combat arms often face situations where the traditional distinction between hazardous front lines and secure rear areas has vanished. ...

In discussing the changes to basic training, Army officers do not specifically acknowledge how deeply the military was stung by some high-profile combat failings, including the attack on an Army support convoy near Nasiriya, Iraq, early in the war. During that firefight, troops of the 507th Maintenance Company were outmaneuvered and then outgunned by Iraqi irregulars.

These dishes sound really good. Perhaps restaurants like this will help people understand that vegetarianism doesn't have to mean salad.

Excerpts:

To date, there have been barely a handful of vegetarian restaurants in the United States that would tempt the average nonvegetarian; most might as well post a "meat-eaters keep out" sign on their doors. People who wanted to eat extraordinary vegetarian food knew that often their best bet was to visit an establishment run by a great chef and ask for a special menu. The results were predictable: pricey and fabulous.

But a new restaurant, Green Zebra, offers what amounts to four-star vegetarian food almost exclusively. In business since April, it is not in New York or San Francisco but in Chicago, a city best known for its steak houses and hot dogs. ...

Green Zebra is wowing vegans, vegetarians and even omnivores with dishes like avocado panna cotta with tomatoes, a silky-smooth concoction with the tomatoes' acidity providing a welcome punch. Then there's the poached egg on a bed of well-seasoned lentils and garlicky spinach purée, with a crisp piece of sourdough toast, a luxurious dish made with simple ingredients. Or maybe roast shiitakes rolled with cabbage and potatoes, pan-fried and topped with a butter emulsion — the ultimate egg roll.

Article in Slate by Daniel Byman, assistant professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. The article argues "the security we've enjoyed since Sept. 11 isn't just a matter of dumb luck." Worthwhile read.

Excerpt:

Before Sept. 11, al-Qaida worked closely with various local jihadist movements, drawing on their personnel and logistics centers for its own efforts and working to knit the disparate movements together. Since 9/11, local group leaders have played a far more important role, taking the initiative in choosing targets and conducting operations, looking to al-Qaida more for inspiration than for direction.

This shift from a centralized structure to a more localized one has made the U.S. homeland safer. The United States, in contrast to many nations in Europe and Asia, does not have a strong, well-organized, radical Islamist presence on its shores. Although there are certainly jihadist sympathizers who might conduct attacks on their own or be used by foreign jihadists as local facilitators, the vast sea of disaffected young Muslim men that is present in Europe and elsewhere has no U.S. parallel. Similarly, the logistics network of forgers, scouts, recruiters, money men, and others is far less developed.