Archive for category: Links

It looks like the CIA may have gotten hit by another double agent in the attack on its Afghan station yesterday.

“What is unique in the Obama administration is their decision that in spite of the disagreements on the political level, the military and intelligence relationship which benefits both sides will not be spoiled by the political tension,” the former head of Israel’s military intelligence is quoted by Eli Lake as saying, in an article describing Obama’s approval of bunker-buster sales to Israel.

A Tiny Revolution chronicles how Lewis Powell Jr’s plan for a right wing conspiracy is being renamed, “Attack of the American Free Enterprise System.”

This great piece on Countrywide’s retaliation against whistleblowers says that one woman wrote Angelo Mozilo describing fraud in mortgage origination in March 2007, and another did so sometime before November 2007. How is it, again, that DOJ decided not to file criminal charges against him?

Reuters continues its excellent series on how corporations use secrecy jurisdictions. This installment? How what gets incorporated in Las Vegas–and Nevada generally–stays secret in Las Vegas.

Steven Aftergood notes that the CIA has classified–and, on that basis, refused a FOIA in its entirety–on its investigations of climate change.

Note: I realized today I never posted a links post I started last week. So these are, uh, dated. But all still worthwhile.

I have been meaning to write about the Solyndra faux scandal but haven’t gotten to it. Thankfully, Kate Sheppard made one of the points I’ve been meaning to make–with visuals! That is, if you want to see a real scandal, not some penny ante pipsqueak faux scandal, you’re gonna have to look at DOD boondoggles like ballistic missile defense or the F-35.

Stephen Walt, in a perhaps self-congratulatory piece, argues that Tom Friedman only discovered the Israel lobby because there have been glaring spotlights focused on it finally (largely by Stephen Walt).

Sony, whose incompetence exposed 100 million customers to data breach earlier this year, is now making people sign away their right to sue Sony in a class action.

Justin Elliott reports that the Obama Administration is seeking a waiver on human rights related trade restrictions with Uzbekistan. We’re doing this not because Uzbekistan has cleaned up its act, but because Pakistan is no longer that reliable an ally, so we need another supply chain into Afghanistan. But as former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray argues that the effort will be counterproductive.

Here’s a cool visualization of where the population centers of the world are and what the lifestyle there is. Make sure to click through to see what each of those lifestyles entails.

 

Remember that top DHS cybersecurity official who quit in June? He’s now working for Sony, which badly needs help protecting their users’ privacy.

In their latest installment reporting on the NYPD’s “CIA-on-the-Hudson,” Goldman and Apuzzo reveal that the NYPD’s spooks have 250 mosques and student groups under surveillance.

Jeffrey Bloomberg reports on Robert Gates bitching about Israel and specifically Bibi Netanyahu for being ungrateful for US efforts to protect Israel’s interests. But he then concludes that the US should nevertheless go to the mat to oppose Palestinian statehood in the UNSC.

Mitch McConnell is cross with Obama because he’s not sending American jobs to Korea fast enough, and not asking Americans to compete against workers who will be killed for organizing fast enough.

This article suggests the rising middle class in developing nations may demand a new focus on getting rid of corruption and expanding democracy. While I’m dubious about this claim generally–it uses the World Bank’s measure for middle class, which is shockingly low, to show the ballooning of the middle class, but then uses Pew results for middle class attitudes–I do wonder whether the reverse is happening in the US, as more and more people fall out of the middle class.

The AP’s headline suggests that Americans are willing to trade civil liberties to protect against terrorism. But poll results seem to say a majority do not want to make that trade–which I believe is a swing back in favor of civil liberties and (for the question on torture) human rights.

This DKos diary anecdotally quantifies austerity at the state level: a couple, both of whom work for the WI state government, who will see $500 less a month in their paycheck because of Scott Walker’s new deductions. That adds up to $20M taken out of the WI economy immediately. Note, this has been going on for part time workers for some years–it’s what the declining average hours worked in BLS surveys translate into.

The DC District Court upheld a District Court ruling that DOJ should turn over at least some of the information ACLU FOIAed on the government’s use of cell phone tracking in criminal prosecutions. DOJ is hiding that cell phone tracking info like a crown jewel–I would imagine things may get interesting when DOJ releases this stuff.

AlterNet has a list of 5 brands to avoid if you’re trying to avoid war profiteers: BP, FedEx, Dell, Kraft, and Pepsi.

A blogger who, after receiving the full gate grope treatment, called it rape on her blog. Now, the TSA Agent who administered the gate grope is suing for $500,000.

I got really behind on these for a few days, so some of these are dated.

A senior military officer claims they’ve finally “got our arms around” contracting to Afghan contractors. But if that doesn’t work, a senior congressional staffer says, they’re going to have “to reduce the [U.S.] footprint in Afghanistan.”

Japan has reintroduced lessons on radioactivity into their middle school curriculum. “The nature of radiation” had been taught until reforms during the 1980s dropped the subject.

We had a heated debate about the canard that half the country doesn’t pay taxes last week. Corey Robin makes a point that I and others also made in the thread: that the real problem with that stat is that it means half of the people who work in this country are paid terrible wages. I agree with him; we’d be better focusing on the low wages here than engaging on the nonsensical claim that these people are deadbeats solely because they’re paid so poorly.

Iran-Contra spook Clair George died of a heart attack on August 11. He was so old (81), he lived at a time when DOJ actually prosecuted Executive Branch figures who lie to Congress. Of course, that was in the era when we didn’t claim the Executive Branch could investigate the Executive Branch. Ah, those were good times.

Jared Bernstein thinks that the collapse in approval of Obama’s treatment of the economy has to do with the focus on the debt ceiling. I’d love to see someone like Nate Silver do more nuanced analysis on this point. In particular, I’d like to see whether people even understand that the “debt ceiling” is related to the “deficit” that polls show, in abstract, concerns people.

The BATF says the supervisors involved in Operation Fast and Furious were not, in fact, promoted, but just moved from a operational to an administrative function. The LAT’s sources stand by the interpretation that these were promotions.

Part of this article about rising levels of drinking in China talks about how important drinking is to doing business, which certainly is consistent with what I experienced when I was doing business there. But it doesn’t consider what that means for gender equality. I would have to explicitly invite women to events (even lunches) that might involve drinking and even there it was generally assumed they wouldn’t drink (I guess, as a heathen I was excepted from that expectation). And I got a real sense that this meant the women were left back at dealers running the business with an “Associate Manager” title while their colleagues with full “Manager” titles were out at drinking lunches with the boss.

SEC whistleblower Gary Aguirre points outs that apologists for the SEC’s document destruction policy–who claim the SEC didn’t violate any existing understanding with the National Archives with their policy–are ignoring a 1992 agreement and pretending a mere name change gimmick changed the rules.

An inquest into the death of the GCHQ spy who was killed and left in a duffel bag last year, Gareth Williams, is scheduled to happen this year.

Detroit says an increasing number of squatters are taking over vacant homes; It seems our state laws make it hard to get rid of them. They should just do what they banks do: pretend they own it. The Registers, after all, can do nothing when they see something out of order on such paperwork.

National Security Archives’ Nate Jones notes that DOD has centralized all FOIA responses for requests on the Osama bin Laden to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He notes that, while OSD has one of the better records on FOIA response at DOD, this might be an attempt to keep the bin Laden photos from Judicial Watch. I’d add, too, that there’s tension bewteen the Army and Navy over this raid, so by centralizing it, you might avoid selective leaks.

China just came out in support of a Palestinian plan to bid for statehood at the UN.

The Steelworkers made this cool video for their Convention. I think the voiceover guy is the same one as did the Chrysler 200 Super Bowl ad.

Banana Republic of America

Public Citizen has a calculator you can use to find out how many jobs from your congressional district may be lost in the Korean Trade deal.

The GOP is gaining among poor and younger white voters. A lot of these people are the same hardest hit by the jobs crisis.

Naomi Klein compares the London riots to Argentine riots of 2001 and looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

It turns out Quantitative Easing helps the MOTUs, but not so much the little people–it mostly went to increased profits and higher prices for goods. Yet these same people who benefited from the higher profits say they can’t be taxed because it’d be unfair.

WalMart’s sales continue to be at risk because their customers keep switching down to lower priced goods.

Our War on Communism Terror Drugs African-Americans Photographers Commuters

The National Security Archive, after much work, has liberated the CIA’s official history of the Bay of Pigs. One of the big revelations is a judgment from November 15, 1960 that the plan would fail without full DOD support–a judgment never shared with Kennedy.

Yochi Dreazen says the SEALs killed in last week’s helicopter attack were pursuing low-level militants unworthy of such an elite team. Of course, one might ask why we’re fighting Taliban with SEALs and not those last 50 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, too.

Another Al Jazeera journalist has been arrested, this time by Israel. They claim the journalist, Kabul bureau chief Samer Allawi, has ties to Hamas.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms just gave promotions to the supervisors who lost a bunch of guns in Operation Fast and Furious–one of them to be Deputy Assistant in BATF’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Security, their internal watchdog. If Darrell Issa didn’t already think this was a cover-up I’m sure this would convince him.

Rahm wants to settle the civil suits arising out of Jon Burge’s torture. While he seems squeamish about letting Mayor Daley testify, settling the suits is absolutely the right thing to do–and a far cry from what Rahm’s former boss is doing in the Vance, Doe, and Padilla suits–these men were all tortured by their government and it’s just appalling to try to deny liability to save a few bucks. Athenae has more on the reporting on this story.

I once took a photography class with a guy doing an entire book of road kill–some of the images were very cool. Lucky, that was in UT and not Long Beach, since cops in that city have a policy that says they can detain photographers if their images have no aesthetic value.

SUSA shows that most people aren’t that bugged that BART shut down its tunnel network last week. (h/t Digby) Hopefully, that won’t deter the FCC from their investigation.

Power to the Power Companies

Japanese utilities, encouraged by the government (and specifically the nuclear industry watchdog), are astroturfing meetings to create the illusion of support for reopening nuclear power plants. Now the effort is backfiring.