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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, January 06, 2006

The Danger of "Performance Issues" 

...for the simpler thinkers out there, those "law and order" right wing hangers-on who insist that some overstepping of legal bounds by the current Administration are perfectly acceptable because honest legal people have nothing to fear, the only two words that need to be said are "Brandon" and "Mayfield". Those two words make up the name of an American citizen, a converted Muslim, who ended up in jail in Portland, Oregon, on charges of having conspired in the Madrid train bombings. He was not a conspirator, of course; he didn't have anything to do with it at all, but he had at one point provided legal representation in a divorce case to a person who later became one of the "Portland Seven", and alledged home-grown radical islamist terrorist cell. Mayfield was eventually cleared of charges, but it was almost exclusively through the loud objections of his friends and family that further examination of two dicey fingerprints forced the Justice Dept. to finally acknowledge that he played no role in the Madrid bombings, although doubts expressed by Spanish forensic experts played a role in his release...

A new report is out pertaining to a Justice Dept. investigation of its own subsidiary FBI. It finds that - while due diligence in the "CSI" tradition wasn't practiced - the FBI agents and technicians who were absolutely sure they had a bad guy on didn't actually violate any real laws, you understand, when they chucked him in the klink for several weeks. The report will tell you, if you can ever get your hands on the thing, that the major problem was that due diligence and the scientife method were not done or were handled in a shoddy fashion. The whole episode was nonsense, of course; Mayfield had no more involvement in the Madrid bombings than he did in the crash of the Hindenburg, but a casual, unrelated connection to another supposed terrorist (and there are serious questions about that whole "Portland 7" thing)unleashed the full Patriot Act powers of the Federal Goverment loose on Mayfield, creating the sort of unlikely personal hell that is more suited for some 'B' movie thriller. Not to worry, says the Justice Dept. No powers were abused, no profiling was done; it was just shoddy work by FBI forensic workers...

There is a natural tendancy to assume a whitewash, given Mayfield's lawsuit against the FBI and the delicate situation that the renewal of the Patriot Act right at this very moment represents. There are questions still remaining about this episode that bear directly on the matter of just how free we are and it's hard to keep the hair on the back of your neck beat down when considering the larger implications of this whole sorry story. We are asked to accept the notion that Mayfield's past associations and his religion had nothing really to do with the whole story; simply a case of mistaken identity, sport. The bottom line, though, is that this was a near thing for Mayfield; if he had been a nobody, he might well still be sucking on chunks of hummus mere feet away from the Carribean Ocean on the southern Cuban coast as a guest on the US military. The whole sordid mess may have just been a question of failed due diligence by FBI forensic experts. There are too many threads to this story, however, to let it just be that simple, and the Justice Dept. investigation and report simply does a piss-poor job of tying all those threads into a suitable pretty bow knot...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:03 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 05, 2006

WHY? 

...apparently it is fast becoming the latest fad for the rich - and more particularly - famous amongst us: running for political office. The latest candidate to throw his NFL Hall of Fame hat into the ring (and I mean literally) is former Pittsburg Steeler great Lynn Swann, who has announced his candidacy for Governor of Pennsylvania. This seems to be generating a lot of excitement, especially in Republican circles, although few have even the faintest idea what, exactly, his position might be on any major issue of the day not connected to questions like whether the ground can cause a fumble or whether instant replay is all that hot an idea. The one thing Pennsylvanians who are going to be subject to this electoral experiment in cross-over name recognition do know (or think they do) is that he appears to be fiscally conservative and is opposed to the right to abortion. These don't at first blush seem to be the sorts of policy positions that would really fire up the mind of the average voter; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Republican candidate who says the same thing - in Pennsylvania or anywhere else...

...California's fling with Celebrity Governorship holds all sorts of messages for anyone who thinks a familiar face is Job One for a candidate with no prior governmental experience at any level and no clearly defined plan of action after election. "Giving Black voters a choice" seems like a pretty skinny perch to start from if the choice only appears to be between a Democrat who aledgedly takes Blacks for granted and a guy who used to be able to run a mean post pattern through a 'cover 2' defense. In any event, the die has been cast, the hat thrown in the ring, and odd hands indeed are bringing that fat toward the fire. These and many other cliches are now running around loose and out in the open and formerly sane people will bleed from the ears before this odd turn of events fully plays itself out. For good or ill, Lynn Swann is in the race for Governor of The Keystone State, and the only good question that comes to mind is "WHY?"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:40 AM 0 comments

Sunday, January 01, 2006

It's the Data Mining, Stupid 

...one thing you have to say for George W. Bush and his grim little band of dwarves: what they lack in honesty and integrity they sure do make up for in dogged tenacity. Even today, Gee Dub was declaiming to reporters that his authorization of warrantless wiretaps was not only vital, but legal to boot. He and his have been clinging to this story like a drunken sailor to a firmly rooted lap post, either because they have some sort of internal polling that says their core constituency eats this stuff will a spork or (more likely) they are merely criminally duplicitous, not stupid, and realize the deep legal pit on who's edge they are precariously teetering. The problem is, though, that the basic storyline - targeted, focused, reviewed, congressionally briefed - has been tearing a good bit at some of the main seams...

The first challenge to Bushco's story about just exactly how the NSA was being employed came with the revelation that they weren't just following a select number of specific targets but were in fact engaging in fundamental data-mining, doing what old spys call "traffic analysis" and kids these days call "pattern analysis", delving through vast swaths of communications traffic looking for patterns that may tip them off to persons of interest. That's not the sort of program Gee Dub first fessed up to, and it's not the sort of thing he was talking about today. This is a serious enough departure from the admininstration story line to raise some eyebrows, since it most certainly not spying on suspected bad guys per se and can result in the warrantless eavesdropping of somebody for no other reason than that person's penchant for chatting frequently with relatives in the Middle East. This by itself is the sort of intrusion that makes the anti-government, "black helicopter" libertarian types I know - and there are a few of them around these parts - start rummaging around for spare clips for the Bushmaster and muttering about heading into the hills...

Today, we now find, Gee Dub's talking point took another sharp poke in the gut as it was revealed that NSA has not only been collecting all these vast gigabytes of information, but has also been sharing them with other Federal agencies. Now, if we were able to trust these Bushco weasels as far as we could throw a Volkswagon Beetle, it would probably be possible to keep the reaction to this information down to mere mild shock. After all, the failure of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to talk to each other was supposedly one of the problems that allowed the Sept. 11 hijackers to pull off their attack. We already know, however, the degree to which the Bush Monkeys will abusively employee top secret information for their own political purposes. Any gang that will casually destroy the CIA cover of an employee, a front company, and an entire network in the service of a cheap personal slapdown of an opponent has forfeited any right to some consideration that they can play it straight with any sort of secret information...

Today's tidbit in the WaPo is where this particular train well and truly flies off the tracks. If you tell me truthfully that a bunch of top secret, high-tech computer geeks operating in the nether regions of technological spookdom are (perhaps illegally) eavesdropping on evil people who have designs on blowing my infidel hide to kingdom come, I am in all honesty probably going to express some shock...shock, I say...at this trampling of Constitutional Freedoms. I'm not going to get overly exercised about it, however, unless one of them breaks in on my phone conversation to agree with my daughter that she is, too, old enough to decide whether she can color her hair flourescent purple for the Easter Sunday service. When you tell me, on the other hand, that vast quantities of data is being passed to other unnamed agencies run by an administration whose ethics would embarrass a pack of hyenas and for who knows what purposes, we have crossed a bright line indeed. This becomes very Nixonian; it opens up a whole Pandora's box of potentially unfettered secret spying on Americans for any purpose a given agency or it's administration handlers sees fit. Gee Dub says whoever blew the whistle on the NSA wiretapping "did great harm" to our security. Does talking about it do the same thing? Does that make one a 'traitor' just like his waterhead minions said opposition to his Grand Iraqi Adventure did, and does this shove a person into the category of "Bears Watching"? Who protects our rights in the absence of the institutional controls that are supposed to do just that? The Enron-led energy supply scam that just about drove West Coast states and their citizens bankrupt early in Gee Dub's first term taught some of us all we needed to know about his native concern for our welfare, so only a moron or the most starry-eyed right wing hero worshipper (and, no, I didn't say those were different things) would ever place that kind of trust in his shakey sweat-greased hands. This is why the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in the first place, for God's sake...

There's been a lot of talk about how Democrats, if they want to capitalize on Republican failings in the next election, need to develop positive declarative position statements. How about this one: "We Will Never Spy On You Without a Warrant"...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:48 PM 0 comments

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