Spring has sprung, but there’s a lot of digging out from underneath layers of Winter fat left to do before we see the first bikini of the season.

It’s not as if burning off the sub-dermal insulation is all that difficult that time of year for residents of the Fortified Mountain Compound. Living in the Santa Cruz Mountains is just like living down in the lowlands, only more so.

We get more clouds, more rain, more fallen trees, more snow, and more reasons to stay indoors while the worst of Winter rages around us. Come March, when the thermostat starts its climb back towards t-shirt weather and household pets begin to shed hair along with inhibitions, the excuses for staying indoors vanish.

There are wildflowers bursting open in the meadows, green shoots on the tips of branches, and insane little songbirds warbling their war-cries at a half-past the crack of dawn. It’s a season of wild growth, of change, renewal, and rutting like wild monkeys in the cool, tender grass as the sun warms your backsides.

But be sure to bring a blanket as you and a friend work off those Winter pounds, because last season’s damp is still in the ground, and Spring’s no time for a cold.

It is time for News, the Timothy Jordan Show News on this 21st of March, Ought-Eight.

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This week marked the fifth anniversary of our country’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The occasion was cause for massive protest marches in major cities all across the country, protests that has just as much effect as they did the first time around.

And while this country spent the week watching the Clinton campaign thrash about in denial of its inevitable failure, the all-but-anointed Republican candidate, John McCain, toured the centerpiece of his folly, surge-weary Iraq.

The accepted mantra of the surge has been that it was a success, that the downturn in random killings and sectarian civil war represents a victory for the Bush administration, and the surge’s Number One Fan, Senator John McCain.

There’s one problem with this story as it’s being told these days, it’s not true.

Yes, the surge has resulted in a relative decrease in violence, down to 2005 levels. This means that only hundreds of people are dying per week as a result of Iraq’s simmering Civil War, as opposed to the thousands a few months ago.

Supporters of the war and occupation have latched on to this reported decrease in violence as proof that the surge was a success. What they, and much of the media, have forgotten is that the surge had two goals, and reducing violence was always the less important of the two.

What caused the violence in the first place was widespread political instability and the legislative gridlock in Iraq’s government. The surge was supposed to put a temporary cap on that violence in order to let cooler heads in the Iraqi government prevail over their more trigger-happy allies.

But while the killings in Baghdad’s streets were slowed, nothing sped up in its government offices. There has been no agreement on how to divide Iraq’s oil wealth, particularly damning when rising prices for that oil are about to give Iraq a budget surplus.

Provincial elections were promised several years ago, but Iraqi legislators are afraid to risk their positions to exposure by the ballot.

And promises to allow former low-ranking members of the Sunni-oriented Baath party, Saddam Hussein’s ruling party, back into government jobs are entirely dependent on the goodwill of Shiite politicians.

So crucial legislation to resolve Iraq’s myriad political disputes has remained stalled while legislators play games of petty intrigue against their rivals? Sounds like they’ve learned a lot from our fine example, although Mike Huckabee’s supporters are a hell of a lot less likely to pick up AKs if their candidate doesn’t win. It’s a real possibility in Iraq.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army didn’t give up their weapons; they just put them down for the moment. They are one order away from returning to the curdled front lines of their Civil War.

Unfortunately the temporary peace of the surge has created the potential for an even bloodier conflict in the year to come. Like a band-aid thrown over an unwashed wound, the surge provided an ideal breeding ground for a host of quasi-political organisms. Intentionally created by the U.S. military, so called “Awakened” Sunni tribal groups now patrol the formerly restless areas of Western Iraq.

The creation, and subsequent arming, of these groups by our military is credited with reducing foreign insurgent activity in the Sunni regions to the West and North of Baghdad. They acted like agents of an immune system, familiar with the ground, more free to move and act against foreign organisms like al Qaeda in Iraq than our own military.

The danger now is that they will start acting like immune cells run amok. What the U.S. government has created is an armed and increasingly organized sectarian militia that operates entirely beyond the control of Iraq’s Shiite government.

The awakened Sunnis may not like Saudi al Qaeda sympathizers, but they don’t like us much more, and they’ve been warring against their Shiite neighbors for over a thousand years.

It won’t be long before they get frustrated with the dictates of their Shiite government and remember the guns in their hands, provided as a courtesy by the U.S. taxpayer.

The surge was supposed to be a first step in withdrawal from Iraq, and instead it’s only burrowed us deeper.

• Iraqi deaths by year

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Part of the problem is the sheer inflexibility of U.S. government bureaucracies.

The Pentagon in particular favors a least-intelligent-denominator approach in its weapons development, according to Government Accountability Office (GAO). In a review of the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, a multi-billion dollar effort to build an entire suite of computer network-linked and -aware weapons, vehicles, and robotic systems for the U.S. Army, the GAO opened with a warning that, “Almost 5 years into the program, it is not yet clear if or when the information network …concept can be developed, built, and demonstrated…”

Five years in, and it isn’t even clear to government investigators if the program will ever work.

The centerpiece of the project was supposed to be a revolutionary computer network linked together by software as the System of Systems Common Operating Environment. The Army envisioned using this network to provide near-instantaneous data connections from the laser-targeted gun scope of an infantryman to every other networked user. It was to be everything that the Internet was supposed to do by 2008, as viewed back in 1998.

And that’s where reality intruded. As the GAO report indicates, the Army had a lot of grand ideas of what it wanted the FCS network to do, but no idea of how to actually build it.

Since 2003 software engineers working on the project have written some 95.1 million lines of code, none of it actually functional in the larger scheme because the Army doesn’t yet know how the overall network is going to work.

Individual components have been demonstrated here and there, but nothing at the system level.

Part of the problem is the inflexibility of the bureaucrats running the programs. Particularly telling is the trouble faced by engineers at iRobot. Best known for their robotic vacuum cleaners, iRobot also supplies military-grade robots to the Pentagon.

They were asked to develop an updated, network-aware robot for the FCS program, but have been struggling under the mindless demands placed upon them. Their robots weigh roughly 30lbs, but the Army program makes no distinction between the size and weight of unmanned vehicles.

The man-portable robot is therefore classified as a vehicle, and so Army regulations require that it have both a fire extinguisher and a trailer hitch, since all Army vehicles have a fire extinguisher and a trailer hitch. According to the GAO, the Army and lead systems integrator, Boeing, were unable to tell the difference between iRobot’s 30lb Packbot and the 5,000lb logistics equipment robot being built by General Dynamics.

Engineers at the 14 individual lead contractors told the GAO that program requirements are being changed with little warning, or awareness of the impact that changes are making on already well-developed hardware.

Key milestones in the overall FCS program are rapidly approaching, and there’s been rumbling in Congress about canceling everything but a handful of promising vehicles. The rest would be abandoned.

• GAO, Significant Challenges Ahead in Developing and Demonstrating Future Combat System’s Network and Software PDF (1.3MB)

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And that’s not the only thing being abandoned by our government.

On Tuesday a District Court in Washington D.C. ordered the White House to explain just why exactly they shouldn’t be required by law to do everything in their power to restore thousands of emails and other communications that went missing between 2001 and 2005.

The order came on the heels of recent disclosures that the White House has no effective system for email management. Efforts to build a backup and archiving system were abandoned, yes there’s that word, abandoned last year.

This is another blunder from an administration already renowned for craptacular information management. Up until October of 2003 the White House recycled their computer backup tapes every few months, making them less than backups, and more… useless.

The National Security Archive, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked the D.C. court to order the immediate preservation of all hard drives and backup tapes used in the White House email system with a forensic copy of all storage devices.

The Court has given the White House until this evening to respond.

• National Security Archive statement

• D.C. Federal Court order to White House PDF (32.6KB)

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Emails aren’t the only things going missing, votes are disappearing, too. According to electronic voting watchdog Ed Felten, machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems failed to properly register votes made in the New Jersey primary election a few weeks ago.

According to records obtained by Mr. Felten, the machine registered 61 votes for Republican candidates, but only 60 Republican ballots issued.

And while the Republican ballot gained a vote, the Democratic side lost one.

Sequoia Systems has responded, saying that it was an activation error on the part of poll workers, based on an oddity in the design of their voting machines. Which doesn’t really explain how things happened. Mr. Felton has a great breakdown of why their story doesn’t make sense, which you can find at his website, freedom-to-tinker.com, linked in this evening’s post of the News segment.

• Sequoia’s explaination, and why it doesn’t make sense

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And that would be it, if we didn’t need to bring our listeners their regular dose of excellence, which will happen… now.

On this Good Friday, we really felt the need to poke a finger or two in the eye of religious-types; and so why not make fun of some Creationists?

PZ Meyers, an associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, and writer at Scienceblogs.com, tried to attend a screening of the latest creationist propaganda movie, Expelled.

He was expected at the screening by the movies producers, who ironically asked security guards to ensure that
Dr. Meyers be expelled from the movie theater before the screening.

His wife and friends were allowed to remain.

Dr. Meyers is going to win tonight because of who his friend was. Attending that night along with him was his friend, Dr. Richard Dawkins, noted critic of creationism, intelligent design, and religion in general.

• Expelled!

Editor’s note: The Senior Political Correspondent’s copy ended here. We’re attempting to reconstruct the remainder from audio records.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.