This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I liked this quick item from the LA Times. Just throws some historical perspective around the incompetence the Bush administration has shown in Iraq by comparing it to the vast incompetence of past presidents in other conflicts. It points out the obvious corollary to the old “History is written by the winners” maxim that mistakes are generally forgotten if in the end the war is won, but are remembered much more clearly if the overall results are negative. The article provides a few examples from various presidencies.
History Can Offer Bush Hope …
(Max Boot, LA Times)
Reading the depressing headlines, one is tempted to ask: Has any president in U.S. history ever botched a war or its aftermath so badly?
Actually, yes. Most wartime presidents have made catastrophic blunders, from James Madison losing his capital to the British in 1814 to Harry Truman getting embroiled with China in 1950.
(via The Volokh Conspiracy)
(Note, Volokh exerpts the entire text of the article, so if you don’t want to bother with the LA Times free registration, you can just read it at Volokh.)
Remember way back when on those forged Yellowcake documents that were part of the case for going into Iraq? I wondered a few times why people were just concentrating on why the administration was fooled (or wanted to be fooled). I said the bigger story that nobody was talking much about was where did the docs come from. Well, a bunch of people have been slowly working on that. Here is the latest development.
Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France
(Bruce Johnson, Telegraph)
The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
(via Captain’s Quarters)
Interesting. The speculation is that France planted it in the hopes that the US would use it, so France could then expose it at an appropriate time to make the US look silly and hurt the pro-war argument. Hmm. Maybe. We’ll see what continues to come out. Initially though, my first reaction is that it is the same kind of conspiracy thinking as those who thought Rove was behind the forged Bush national guard docs. In both cases, we’re talking people forging documents that build cases against themselves in the hopes the forgeries will be discovered (but not traced all the way back to them) and then make the people who actually use the forgeries in public look bad. Very high risk plan. Lots of potential for backfire. But which COULD work if it went exactly according to plan.
In the case of the forged Bush documents, it now looks pretty clear that a less convoluted path explains what happened. The originator looks like it was this Bill Burkett guy who has been trying to rile up the National Gaurd issue against for many years and who may have “recreated” these documents, the originals of which were supposedly destoryed years ago. No oddness, no strange loops. Just a guy with an agenda who thought this could help his cause, but who was completely wrong and ended up with the opposite result than he intended. And the people along the chain who wished it was true so much they passed it along without even the slightest bit of doubt or questioning.
Hmmm… that part sounds like the Yellowcake docs again. Maybe they are similar after all. Maybe the “they came from French Intelligence” thing will pan out. I haven’t seen enough to make a judgement yet. But on these sorts of things, Occam’s Razor *usually* wins out in the end. But not always. We will see.
Glad we went to New Orleans last week instead of this week!
1.2 Million Warned to Leave New Orleans
(Mary Foster, AP on Yahoo)
Residents streamed inland in bumper-to-bumper traffic in an agonizingly slow exodus Tuesday amid dire warnings that Ivan could overwhelm New Orleans with up to 20 feet of filthy, chemical-polluted water.
…
Experts said Ivan could be worse, sending water pouring over levees, flooding to the rooftops and turning streets into a toxic brew of raw sewage, gas and chemicals from nearby refineries.
Just found this that someone put together…
2004 Electoral Vote Animation (May 24 – Present)
(via The Daily Dish)
It takes the maps and data from electoral-vote.com and produces an animated history of how the states have been shifting over the last few months.
OK, here goes at posting back the normal way. Here’s my first “news” one since my absence. First, since I have been away, a quick summary of the issue from Slate:
Rather Suspicious
(Josh Levin, Slate)
On Wednesday night, CBS News released four memos it claimed were written in 1972 and 1973 by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. In one of the documents, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian writes that a Guard official was “pushing to sugar coat” Bush’s training evaluation; in another, Killian suspects that Bush is “talking to someone upstairs” about getting transferred. Within a few hours of the CBS report, bloggers were questioning the authenticity of the documents. By today, the doubts were on the front page of the Washington Post.
(via InstaPundit)
OK. Now, my take… I was immediately completely convinced by this. Charles from Little Green Footballs was the first person I saw to do this, although others have done this since. Now, as far as I am concerned Charles is a right wing nutcase, and reading his site often makes me cringe because of just how bad it is and not in sync with my way of understanding the world. However… he opened MS Word, used default settings, and reproduced the docuement exactly (minus fax transmission defects). Done. Convinced. Yes, there may have been the tech to do the fonts and everything else back then. Maybe. But that is just too close a match. I have no doubts in my mind. These are fakes, and bad fakes. They didn’t even try.
People like PowerLine have done much more detailed font analysis. But it isn’t even needed. The little demonstration in Word is all it really takes, counter arguments by Daily Kos aside. That just doesn’t convicne me at all. And it actually seems a bit desperate.
The only defense I could think of that made sense was that these were not actually the originals, and for some bizzare reason CBS had used a retyped copy for clarity. But they are standing by it. And all sorts of voices on left of center websites are desperately trying to research old typewriters to prove that these could be real.
Give it up. I am not a Bush fan. I think he is an idiot. I think the charges about him in the National Gaurd and what he did and didn’t do are most likely true. But these docs do NOT support that case. It is completely and totally obvious they were done in Word. Recently. And that isn’t even mentioning the critiques on other grounds. Anyone who defends these documents at this point is just making themselves look like idiots. Just stop, relax, find other issues to attack W on. This is not it.
A few days ago the State Department dropped the travel warning it had on Angola. Thus the number of countries with State Department Travel warnings has dropped to 25. This is once again at the number it was when I started tracking this statistic in October 2003. In between it peaked at 27 countries, where it stayed from December 2003 to March 2004. In April the State Department dropped the warning for Turkey. Now they have dropped the warning for Angola. So start planning your trips to those places now!
State Department Travel Warnings Over Time
A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time. Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time. Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.
Watch what happens with Chalabi. In many ways he manipulated the American Neo-Cons into the invasion last year. Now it hasn’t gone the way he wants and the Americans are turning on him (finally). But it doesn’t seem he will go quietly. He is definately one to watch.
The Truth About Ahmed Chalabi
(Andrew Cockburn, CounterPunch)
In dawn raids today, American troops surrounded Ahmed Chalabi’s headquarters and home in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his aides, and seized documents. Only five months ago, Chalabi was a guest of honor sitting right behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union. What brought about this astonishing fall from grace of the man who helped provide the faked intelligence that justified last year’s war?
The answer lies in Chalabi’s reaction to his gradual loss of US support in recent months and the realisation that he will be excluded from the post June 30 Iraqi “government” being crafted by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.
Lashing out against his exclusion from power, he has in effect been laying the groundwork for a coup, assembling a Shia political coalition with the express aim of destabilising the “Brahimi” government even before it takes office. “
(via MetaFilter)
It would be great if we have another rerun with disputes taking weeks to resolve the election! I love that stuff! Maybe this time it can be sent to the House where it belonged last time…
This guy is using last year’s election results, plus current state by state poll results and such to keep a running projection of the likely outcome in November. Right now his projections are showing a result almost identical to 2000. Yum! Fun stuff! The closer it is, the more fun it is to watch! (Forget about the actual results and who wins, I’m just talking the enjoyment of watching the process!)
Polling Data Update
Now to the first returns using the new formula. Are you kidding me?? The President is slightly behind Senator Kerry in the popular vote, 48.56% – 49.61%, while once again winning the electoral vote race, 274-264! So, after hours and hours of data processing using the new formula, we’re right back where we ended up almost 4 years ago! Without state polls included, Kerry would win Florida and Bush would win New Hampshire. The first state poll advantage goes to the President.
(via Wizbang!)
Full 2004 Election Projections.
After all the bad press Chalabi got before the war started, during it and since, the fact that he is still a major player, and may well end up in charge after June 30th. I hope those who will decide exactly who ends up in the government we hand over power to in a month in a half have some sense and don’t let this guy be in charge, but given past history, I have no faith whatsoever that will happen. We will probably end up doing exactly the WRONG thing.
Interesting posting by Juan Cole, one of the expert speakers in front of recent Senate hearings along with Richard Perle, one of Chalabi’s big pushers in the past.
Perle at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
(Juan Cole, Informed Consent)
It is deeply shameful that Perle is still pushing Chalabi, and may well succeed in installing him. Chalabi is wanted for embezzling $300 million from a Jordanian bank. He cannot account for millions of US government money given him from 1992 to 1996. He was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon (Perle was on the Defense Advisory Board, a civilian oversight committee for the Pentagon) with a thousand of his militiamen. The US military handed over to Chalabi, a private citizen, the Baath intelligence files that showed who had been taking money from Saddam, giving Chalabi the ability to blackmail large numbers of Iraqi and regional actors. It was Chalabi who insisted that the Iraqi army be disbanded, and Perle almost certainly was an intermediary for that stupid decision. It was Chalabi who insisted on blacklisting virtually all Baath Party members, even if they had been guilty of no crimes, effectively marginalizing all the Sunni Iraqi technocrats who could compete with him for power. It was Chalabi who finagled his way onto the Interim Governing Council even though he has no grassroots support (only 0.2 percent of Iraqis say they trust him).
The Supremes heard the case of the people at Guantanamo today. The Op-Ed below makes some of the most relevant points I think. Fundamentally, a person is a person is a person. Citizenship should not matter for most things. Making double standards like that is just asking for the reverse to be done to us at some point in the future. It is bad precident. Not to mention just plain wrong. Citizen or not, there should NEVER be a situation in a controled environment (perhaps exceptions for “heat of the situation” in the middle of a raging battle) when a person has no mechanism whatsoever to appeal their situation to an independant body. It is fundamental to the notion of checks and balances and preservation of basic human rights.
America’s Prisoners, American Rights
(David Cole, New York Times)
All three branches of government have treated citizenship as a central issue. The Bush administration says that it can hold the foreign detainees, most of whom were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, without any legal limitations because they are noncitizens held outside American borders. As such, it argues, they have no constitutional rights and no standing in American courts to challenge their detentions. […] These suggestions that noncitizens have less right to be free than citizens are ill advised. Some provisions of the Constitution do explicitly limit their protections to United States citizens — the right to vote and the right to run for Congress or president, for example. The Bill of Rights, however, does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens. It extends its protections in universal language, to “persons,” “people” or “the accused.” The framers considered these rights to be God-given natural rights, and God didn’t give them only to persons holding American passports.
(via TalkLeft)
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