Month: July 2003

Saddam’s Osama connection

Judge Gilbert Merrit has been given a document naming Saddam’s chief contact with Osama: The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ”responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.” The document shows that it was written over the … Continue reading “Saddam’s Osama connection”

Judge Gilbert Merrit has been given a document naming Saddam’s chief contact with Osama:

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ”responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.”

The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein.

The judge, a Democrat serving on the federal appeals court in Nashville who’s currently in Iraq creating a court system, says he believes the document is genuine. We believe it’s the smoking gun.

Via Instapundit.

Iranian demos

Jeff Jarvis reports that the Iranian demonstrations were cancelled by the leaders of the student movement in the face of government threats of violence, but world-wide they’re still on. UPDATE: Jerusalem Post reports the Iranians demonstrated anyway: Shrugging off death threats by government paramilitary forces, tens thousands of Iranian students took to the streets Wednesday … Continue reading “Iranian demos”

Jeff Jarvis reports that the Iranian demonstrations were cancelled by the leaders of the student movement in the face of government threats of violence, but world-wide they’re still on.

UPDATE: Jerusalem Post reports the Iranians demonstrated anyway:

Shrugging off death threats by government paramilitary forces, tens thousands of Iranian students took to the streets Wednesday night, burning at least three government banks, calling for the country’s democratization and the death to its extremist leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini.

The demonstrations, banned by the Mullarchy, came on the 4th anniversary of 1999 pro-reform protests which triggered a violent regime crackdown, the death of one student and the arrest of thousands.

Opposition group leaders hailed Wednesday’s demonstrations the culmination of month-long anti-government activities as a deadly blow to the repressive regime, saying it edges Iran ever closer to a democratic revolution.

Good for them.

UNSCOM chief on Saddam’s WMDs

This article has been up for a while, but I just found it via a link from Christopher Hitchens in Slate. The author, Rolf Ekeus, was the head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, and now runs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He explains the nature of the Iraqi WMD program, why stocks of chemical weapons … Continue reading “UNSCOM chief on Saddam’s WMDs”

This article has been up for a while, but I just found it via a link from Christopher Hitchens in Slate. The author, Rolf Ekeus, was the head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, and now runs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He explains the nature of the Iraqi WMD program, why stocks of chemical weapons are hard to find, and what Saddam intended to do with the weapons. Unlike fellow Swede Hans Blix, Ekeus supports the invasion:

The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq’s own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel.

The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities.

The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East.

This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative — letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability — would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world’s energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people.

This is powerful stuff and it deserves a lot of play.

Misunderstanding the Internet

The mistaken idea that Internet architecture is “End-to-End” has cropped up again, this time on the Doc Searls blog, with a reference to some orders to the FCC from Larry Lessig, who’s not especially empowered to make them. While there are many problems with using the FCC to impose this view (like, um, the fact … Continue reading “Misunderstanding the Internet”

The mistaken idea that Internet architecture is “End-to-End” has cropped up again, this time on the Doc Searls blog, with a reference to some orders to the FCC from Larry Lessig, who’s not especially empowered to make them.

While there are many problems with using the FCC to impose this view (like, um, the fact that they can’t), and with Searls’ desire to make a political litmus test out of it, the most important is that it’s simply not true. While it may be argued that the Internet has an “end-and-end” architecture that concentrates as much intelligence as possible in the endpoints and has precious little in the middle, a truly “end-to-end” architecture would allow the ends to control the flow of messages through the middle, and the current architecture can’t do that.

An end-to-end architecture, in other words, would allow a voice application to tell the network “I need a narrow stream of bandwidth connecting me to this other end, but I need that stream to be free of jitter. I don’t need retransmission of packets dropped to relieve congestion, but I do need to know I’m getting through, and I’m willing to pay 25 cents a minute for the that.” Or it would allow a caching media application to say “I need lots of bandwidth for a 4 gigabyte transfer, but I don’t want to pay a lot for it and you can work it around other applications that need small chunks because I don’t care about jitter.” Or it would allow an email application to say “Send this the cheapest way, period.” And it would allow a teleconferencing application to say “send this to my group of these 14 end points without jitter and with moderately high bandwidth and we’ll pay you a reasonable fee.”

The network would then deal with congestion by dropping the spam and the e-mail until conditions improve, and by delaying the honking media files, but it would endeavor to deliver as many of the voice and real-time media packets as possible. It therefore wouldn’t allow spam to step on VoIP, as it does now. Most of us are able to see that this would be progress, but we see the Internet as a tool, and not as a socio-political metaphor.

There are a number of kludges that have been adopted in TCP to approximate a truly end-to-end capability, but none of them really make it a reality because there’s not enough smarts in IP and its various kludgy cousins (ICMP, IGMP) to make this work. So freezing the architecture at this stage would be a serious mistake, which is why you never see network architects arguing for the things that Searls (a Public Relations man), Lessig (a law professor) or Dave Weinberger (a philosophy professor) want.

The story of how the Internet came by its odd architecture, which it doesn’t share with the much better-designed ARPANET, coherent architectures like SNA and DECNet, and extant PDNs, is a story of ambitious professors, government grants, and turf wars among contractors that’s not at all a tale of the best design winning out, but more on that later. This “end-to-end” fantasy is simply historical revisionism, and we need to nip it in the bud before it does any more damage.

UPDATE: Weinberger gets defensive about his creds at the wanky Supernova conference:

Up now, David Weinberger brings the Cluetrain ethos to the new areas of digital identity and DRM, professing his end-user ignorance as his unique qualification for speaking for normal users and articulating the rights they would want to protect.

Heh heh heh.

The trouble with Democrats

Democrats have a problem with snobbery, according to Michael Barone: Core Democrats have an emotional investment in the idea that George W. Bush is an idiot [they believe they’re] smarter than other people. At the heart of their hatred of Bush is snobbery… Dean and Kerry [exude snobbery]. This could give whichever of them survives … Continue reading “The trouble with Democrats”

Democrats have a problem with snobbery, according to Michael Barone:

Core Democrats have an emotional investment in the idea that George W. Bush is an idiot [they believe they’re] smarter than other people. At the heart of their hatred of Bush is snobbery… Dean and Kerry [exude snobbery]. This could give whichever of them survives New Hampshire an edge with core Democrats.

If the snob factor leads Democrats to nominate Kerry or Dean, Bush wins in a landslide, because most Americans don’t share this attitude. Barone is one of the most serious students of American politics, and his views are worth considering.

Link via Instapundit.

Independence Day

On this day in the year 2000, the evil Boston Globe muzzled its only conservative voice, Jeff Jacoby, for submitting the well-traveled history of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Globe called it plagiarism, but everybody who can read knows it’s not an original work, and that Jacoby wasn’t trying to pass it … Continue reading “Independence Day”

On this day in the year 2000, the evil Boston Globe muzzled its only conservative voice, Jeff Jacoby, for submitting the well-traveled history of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The Globe called it plagiarism, but everybody who can read knows it’s not an original work, and that Jacoby wasn’t trying to pass it off as one. The net effect of the Globe’s action was to deprive its readers of a conservative voice during the Bush/Gore contest of 2000, not that Massachusetts was ever in danger of leaving the plantation.

I mention this just to remind you that even in these enlightened times, standing up for America can cost you your job, or worse. This is especially true in the bastions of left-wing thought, such as Boston and the San Francisco Bay, where free speech is only valued when the speech is politically correct. But that just makes speaking your mind all the more worthwhile, doesn’t it?

This year, left-wing critics are lambasting Patriot II and the supposedly massive erosions of civil liberties that it represents (a good example: San Jose Mercury News South Bay columnist L. A. Chung invoking 75-year-old peace activists to make her point emotionally.) Not to suggest that these critics are less than sincere, I wonder how they would feel about a law that provided for such things as these:

  • All bank records, utility accounts, cable TV, and phone records to be turned over to the government every month for examination.
  • Prosecution of criminal offenses in a civil court in order to deny indigent accused the right to counsel at taxpayer expense.
  • Suspension of professional licenses and drivers licenses by administrative process without court intervention.
  • Seizure of property without court order.
  • Property liens against people who had violated no law and owed no unpaid debt.
  • Elimination of the requirement that court orders be served on the defendant.
  • Issuance of court orders kicking people out of their homes on hearsay evidence submitted to a court by fax.
  • Court-ordered, mandatory political re-education in the values of a particular political organization.
  • Elimination of the right to confront the accuser and the presumption of innocence in certain criminal cases.
  • A national database, updated in real-time, of the names, addresses, and social security numbers of all working Americans.
  • Arrests without warrant and detentions without charge, often of the wrong people, in “midnight sweeps.”
  • Debtors’ prisons.
  • A law forbidding the correction of court orders made on the basis of false information.
  • A sweeping denial of equal protection based on gender.
  • Court orders requiring some working adults to live in poverty in order that they support other adults, who don’t work, in high style.

    Now, on the face of it, we’d expect anyone with the least concern for civil liberties to be up in arms over a law with just some of these provisions, let alone all of them. Yet the very critics of the Patriot Act and of Patriot II sat on their hands while every single one of the provisions I listed above passed into law in the name of child support, child custody reform, alimony, and domestic violence prevention. And in some cases, the critics weren’t just silent (as the ACLU and EFF were), they actually sponsored the legislation, as the National Organization for Women did.

    So who do you trust on civil liberties, the occasionally overzealous guardians of national security in the White House and Justice Department, or the left-wing organizations criticizing them who give “hypocrisy” a whole new dimension?

    (note: I am not saying, of course, that child support is bad or that domestic violence is good; I am saying you’re either in favor of civil liberties for all or you aren’t, and the vast majority of those hammering the Bush Administration on this issue today have proved they aren’t.)