February 15th, 2008
It is, as listeners undoubtedly know, an election year. And oh what an election year!
Our economy continues to tank, washed out in the background noise of the campaign while the government mails out a few hundred bucks to eligible taxpayers, enough to buy a week or two of gas for the family car.
Meanwhile the national debt continues to skyrocket.
Nearly four thousand American military personnel have been killed in what is now the fifth year of the war in Iraq, a war launched to rid that country of imaginary weapons. Two countries over there’s a government that actually has weapons of mass destruction that’s on the verge of collapse.
The Bush administration is torturing people detained in a global war on an abstract noun.
Also caught in the wake of that global war on an abstract noun are many American civil liberties. It’s no longer possible to hold protests in view of the President. The 1st Amendment has been corralled into “Free Speech Zones” miles away from his motorcades.
And the 4th Amendment’s right to privacy apparently only applies to the dealings that our nation’s major telecommunications companies have with the government while they’re spying on us, according to some.
In the face of all these seemingly critical issues, Congress and the national media found the time to focus on something even more vital to our nation’s future: whether Roger Clemens had steroids injected into his All-Star butt-cheek.
Don’t get me wrong, I do care about baseball. Even though my A’s are looking to field a team this spring that only just might be good in two years, I’m still going to make the drive up to watch their games. The national pastime is an important part of American culture, but people are dying in foreign lands because decisions made by our government, and the best that the House Oversight Committee can do is interview Roger Clemens about his alleged steroid use?
It’s like being told that your house is on fire and worrying about running out of cat food.
They should be calling out the fire department, but instead some members of Congress chose to organize a photo op with an antisocial baseball star and his ego.
It’s bad enough just knowing that the Congressional hearing happened at all. It only becomes disturbing when you get to the point in the Committee transcript where Rep. Lynch starts discussing the palpable mass on Clemens’ buttocks.
It must have been quite the scene on Capitol Hill, a room full of elderly and middle-aged men intently focused on Mr. Clemens’ buttocks and the disputed origin of his apparently well-documented palpable mass.
• House Oversight Committee transcript, Clemens & McNamee testimony PDF (494.2KB)
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There’s something palpable here, it’s my disgust at politicians wasting our time, and the media wasting it again. Well I’m covered in too much poison oak to waste anyone’s time, because I need to slather myself in hydrocortizone cream. But before I can get out of here to do that, it’s time for this, the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 15th of February, ‘08.
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It wasn’t all bad and inane news out of Congress this week. Well not completely bad, even though the U.S. Senate caved to pressure from Republicans, the President, and intelligence officials scheming to provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who may have broken the law when they just may have illegally helped the government illegally wiretap American citizens.
The Senate voted on Tuesday, despite a heroic filibuster attempt by one of our new heros on this show, Sen. Chris Dodd, to pass the Intelligence Committee’s version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization.
The version of the bill passed in the Senate would effectively silence thousands of critics of the Warrantless Wiretapping program who have resorted to the legal system to get answers about just what kind of information the government has been gathering on American citizens. California’s Senators were split on the issue, with Senator Feinstein bowing to industry and administration pressure by voting for immunity.
I, for one, will be volunteering to help anyone in the progressive left who runs against Sen. Feinstein when her current term ends… in 2012. Damn.
The three presidential candidates in the Senate also had a chance to show where their allegiances lay. Sen. McCain voted for the protection of industry. Sen. Obama voted in favor of accountability. And Sen. Clinton… didn’t bother to vote.
But that’s not the end of the story, because the House, in a rare display of Democratic party unity and testicular fortitude, decided to let the Protect America Act lapse rather than rush a vote in favor of increased wiretapping abilities for the government and immunity for the telecoms. The House version of the bill, known as the RESTORE Act, doesn’t include immunity for the telecoms, and also requires increased oversight over government wiretapping programs.
It should be noted that the only reason we’re even seeing a vote on this, the Protect America Act (what a horrible, fake, loaded name), was a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year that the President’s warrantless wiretapping was illegal.
An attempt to pass a one-month extension of the Act failed to pass the House on Wednesday, thanks to opposition by the President, who’d obviously like to see the Democrats stop drawing attention to the wiretapping of American citizens.
Speaking before the press yesterday, Mr. Bush said that, “this is what is necessary to protect the American people from harm. And I recognize there hasn’t been an attack on our country, but that does not mean that there’s not still an enemy that lurks, plans and plots.”
The President and his supporters have tried to claim that allowing the Protect America Act to expire makes the country vulnerable to terrorist threats by cutting off existing wiretaps and preventing new ones from being started.
There’s a problem with this claim. It isn’t true. Not even remotely. As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes wrote in a public letter to the President earlier this week, “If our nation is left vulnerable in the coming months, it will not be because we don’t have enough domestic spying powers. It will be because your Administration has not done enough to defeat terrorist organizations – including al Qaeda — that have gained strength since 9/11. We do not have nearly enough linguists to translate the reams of information we currently collect. We do not have enough intelligence officers who can penetrate the hardest targets, such as al Qaeda. We have surged so many intelligence resources into Iraq that we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result, you have allowed al Qaeda to reconstitute itself on your watch.”
I’d like to point out that this is all about warrantless wiretapping, while wiretapping with warrants continues as it always has, with near-total freedom for law enforcement. In 2006 the government made 2,181 wiretap requests to the Surveillance Court. Of those, 2,176 were granted, with five withdrawn before the Court ruled on them.
So based on that, roughly, and it’s hard to say with these numbers, but roughly 100% of the requests submitted for review were granted. Apparently a 100% rate of success isn’t enough for the Bush crew. Always pushing the standards higher, those guys.
Except for privacy standards. Those are threats to the global war on abstract nouns.
• Mr. Bush’s comments on wiretapping law
• Roll call vote on Dodd Amendment to the FISA Amendments Act of 2007
• Letter from Rep. Reyes to President Bush PDF (56.4KB)
• DoJ, 2006 FISA authorizations PDF (139KB)
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We’re a little closer to getting answers about the hundreds of thousands of White House email messages that went missing between 2001 and 2005, and potentially the opening of a treasure-trove of close-held Bush Administration secrets.
Earlier this week District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Executive Office of the President to submit to a jurisdictional review of whether it’s an agency subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The President’s Office, technically the Office of Administration (OA), has argued that it isn’t a formal government agency, merely an extension of the President’s staff, and therefore not required to provide answers to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
If the discovery effort by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is successful, it would mean that eight years of information considered privileged by the White House could be open to FOIA review.
Critical for the CREW’s case will be evidence that the OA acts with substantial authority independent from direct orders by the Presidential Staff. If it does, then it’s subject to the same rules of disclosure as any other government agency.
That would be great news for supporters of open government, but highly distressing to Dark Lord Cheney and his minions. Which is why we’re keeping our fingers crossed that there’s good news for CREW in the next 45 days.
• CREW FOIA request order PDF (57KB)
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The House may have shot down the wiretapping authorization this week, but the Pentagon is preparing to shoot down a satellite next week.
In a move that some experts have called, “terrible,” and “worrying”, the U.S. government is about to shoot down one of its own satellites.
Known as USA 193, the satellite is believed to be an advanced radar platform for the National Reconnaissance Office. Its main computer failed soon after launch, either due to, or the cause of the satellite’s solar panels failing to deploy. Out of power, the satellite has been slowly drifting towards the ground every day.
It was expected that nearly all of the satellite would burn up during re-entry, with a small chance that debris would fall on the less than a quarter of its orbit that passes over land.
The only people that cared about it up until this week were space geeks and satellite watchers, that was up until the Pentagon announced plans to shoot it down. And here’s where things get strange.
The Pentagon is proposing to use a ship-based interceptor missile, the SM-3, that’s been designed to shoot down airplanes or ballistic missiles. Why they want to do this isn’t clear.
The official justification for the shoot-down attempt isn’t the classified antenna and computer hardware, it’s the 1000lbs of hydrazine rocket fuel carried onboard. Officially it was the President, concerned that this could come down in a populated area, who asked if the satellite could be shot down.
The Pentagon decided that it could, though not with one of the ground-based interceptors currently based, and declared operational, in Alaska and California. They decided to use the much smaller ship-based SM-3 missile instead.
Just what that 20 kilo interceptor missile will do to a 2,300 kilogram satellite has space experts worried. The Chinese anti-satellite test of last January created a debris cloud that continues to orbit our planet. Every piece of debris matters in space, where a fleck of paint traveling at 22,000 mph can ruin your whole day.
NASA Administrator Griffin said that the risk of damage to the Space Shuttle and International Space Station are lower than the risk of launching the Shuttle, which blows up at a rate of once every sixty launches or so. The risk to the ISS is estimated to be more like 1-1000.
The government’s justification for the intercept doesn’t smell right, however. The general consensus is that even if the hydrazine fuel tank manages to miraculously stay intact all the way through re-entry, the less than 1000lbs of hydrazine onboard would create a cloud roughly 600 feet long.
We’ve been tracking objects as they re-enter the atmosphere for over fifty years now. It’s not very hard anymore to predict where they’ll land once they start falling. If it seemed likely that the fuel tank were going to fall directly on a populated area in the satellite’s path, issuing an evacuation order for that area covering 1/10,000,000,000th of the orbit area would be far more cost-effective than shooting it down with a $10-15 million missile.
The real reason, experts suggest, is a last-ditch effort at saber rattling by a Bush administration that has seen few successes for its missile defense program. A successful intercept would provide some justification for continuing the hugely expensive defense program while also showing the Chinese that they’re not the only government crazy enough to blow aging satellites out of the air.
• Pentagon briefing on the satellite shoot-down
• Analysis via Arms Control Wonk
• Experts question satellite shoot-down, via Danger Room
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What is that missing satellite going to cost us? The government promised to pay for any damages that result from falling debris, but that still leaves out the excellence. Gotta have some excellence.
This may come as some surprise to listeners, but you don’t actually need billion-dollar spy satellites to provide excellence reconnaissance. With a little work even a million-dollar satellite will do just fine.
Our winner of the Award of Excellence proved that this week. Using only the satellite imagery provided by Google Earth, military photos poster Planeman was able to identify over 150 anti-aircraft gun positions surrounding the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
This is information that our government used to spend billions of dollars in equipment and analysts to reveal, and now it’s in the hands of private citizens to discover.
With some basic information about Soviet-era air defense equipment, he was able to determine the firing range of air defense guns around the capital, as well as to locate underground sites where guns and radars were hidden from view. Even better, he laid it all out in a series of annotated photos for all of us to see on the militaryphotos.net website.
Based upon Google Earth maps, it’s possible, thanks to the work by Planeman, to tell that North Korean air defenses around Pyongyang are horribly outdated. It used to be that we’d have to rely on the word of our government to know what something like North Korea’s air defenses looked like.
If we’d had people like Planeman in the 1950s, and something like Google Earth, we would have been able to tell that all the anti-Soviet missle-gap talk was nothing more than fear-mongering by U.S. politicians and military leaders in order to inflate their own importance.
Being able to knock those claims down is damn excellent, and that’s why anonymous poster Planeman is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
• Bluffer’s guide: Fortress North Korea
And that’s the News for February 15th, ‘08. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you again the same time next week.