Dick Destiny

2009-06-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

UNSOILED

Are you not afraid of electromagnetic pulse attack? The GOP is.

The Daily Dishwater on Cyberwar. L. Gordon Crovitz is a special lad.

Predator State commercials.

2009-06-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

RULE NUMBER ONE: Always blame China

At the SITREP blog on GlobalSecurity.Org here.

Cyberwar menace causing insomnia? Sadly, no

DD blog. Using WordPress and enjoying it, not Blogger and fighting it.

2009-06-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

HAVE YOU HEARD, WHAT'S THE WORD? IT'S THUNDERBIRD!

Stumble and fail.

Me on the radio.

2009-06-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

ROCK 'N' ROLL

The good, the numbingly bad, and the 'meh.'

Numbingly bad guitar video

The Thin Line Between Great and Sub-Mediocre

2009-06-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

RICIN KOOKS

The latest in the never-ending story or ricin putterers. At the REAL Dick Destiny blog.

2009-06-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

KERFUFFLE OVER NUKE LIST

The last few articles at the new REAL Dick Destiny blog, in the directory over:

FAS removes nuke list doc after news fit

The newest al Qaeda bonehead.

More on the recent cybersecurity policy review.

And -- Born to Be Mild -- in Rock 'n' Roll.

2009-05-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

SAME OLD STORY: MORE CYBERSECURITY SEZ OBAMA

Thrilling! Read all about it from the curmudgeon, here or here.

2009-05-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

TODAY'S BIG BAG OF STUFF

You're missing it in the directory over. Today, on the Poor Man's Jimi Hendrix.

And Your Telephone, the Booby Trap.

But why aren't you putting the full stories on this Blogger blog, Dick? The straw that broke the camel's back is retold here.

2009-05-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

WHEN FAMOUS, YOU GET TO MAKE STUFF UP

Hardly novel. But again, it's for the sake of believing some line from the the war on terror and the essay points made by a very important journalist, Peter Bergen. Bergen discusses the merits of the Predator drone assassination campaign in Af-Pak for The New Republic. To that end he uses as a lead example, a man named 'Abu Khabab,' allegedly a fellow who trained hundreds of terrorists on how to make ricin, one who was eventually killed by a drone attack. While a drone killed the man, there's no significant evidence he was an expert in WMD. And quite a bit to the contrary. So, naturally, Bergen earns an emphatic DD takedown, and you can read it in the directory over here.

2009-05-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

BOSTON LOCALS DELAY BIODEFENSE LAB

Good news! They fight for the right not to have a superfluous bioterror germ research lab near them. Go to the mirror, boy.

2009-05-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

GET TORTURED AND DIE

It's the American way. You know what to do. See "Powell Star Tortured to Death" here on DD's WordPress blog in the directory over. Because Blogger tortured me into it.

2009-05-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

BED PAN TECH

Out of work? In despair? New unemployment reforms will shape the US future workforce. Bed pan technician-training schools administrators rejoice. Relief is coming. 'Nuff said! See here.

2009-05-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

THE O'TOOLE FILE

Today, updates to the post on the Obama administration's appointment to be head scientist at the Department of Homeland Security.

First posted at DD's WordPress blog in the directory over, here.

Even if you're a regular and haven't reset your bookmarks, the refers will still post on this piece of real estate.

Anyway, page down and you'll see --

Tara O’Toole predicts

U Pitt News, April 15, 2005

One hundred kilograms of anthrax dropped on Washington, D.C., would be as deadly as a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.

This is one of the many reasons why Dr. Tara O’Toole believes the use of biological weapons is “potentially imminent.”

O’Toole discussed bioweapons in her lecture “Disease as a Weapon: A New Challenge for the 21st Century.” The speech, full of cautionary words and threats of unavoidable disaster, fell upon the ears of an Alumni Hall audience Tuesday afternoon.

Bioweapons have been proven to work on a large scale; they can kill hundreds of thousands of people at one time. Generally, it is difficult to determine where a bioweapon was let loose, so an exact radius of destruction is hard to calculate, O’Toole said.

You know what to do for more.

2009-05-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

CATASTROPHIC NOMINATION

Tara O’Toole, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, has been nominated by the Obama administration to be the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security. While readers may not know the name, if one actually likes their science based in reality, not scenarios which are Biblically apocalyptic and free of facts, it is a dreadful choice.

At the Danger Room blog, Noah Schachtman queried DD and others on the wisdom of the administration’s move.

“This is a disastrous nomination,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and homeland security policy critic, told Schachtman.

“O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush dministration … O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”

“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of overnment, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security … She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.”

Published on DD's WordPress mirror, you can read the rest here.

2009-05-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

SIT HOME AND ROT

Yesterday's observation on attitudes about employment and job-hunting in the US published only to the mirror here. The mirror will now start to update before the Blogger flavor, precipitated by the event of Google's Blogger regularly ~~hating on~~ failing for those using FTP publishing. Readers are encouraged to reset their favorites and syndication feeds to draw from blog.dickdestiny.com.

Trends and indications point to Google wanting all Blogger users hosted on their servers. That's just not going to happen, for any number of reasons, some of which are patently obvious. (Number one: Disentanglement -- or more realistically, forfeiture -- of a long established Google-linked set of posts on DD dot com in favor of moving DD dot com virtually to exclusive Google property is no option. This Google Blogger suggestion is more like a veiled threat.)

2009-05-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

WHEN BLOGGER ATTACKS

Blogger attacked your host on Friday, killing me dead. If you didn't know to read the mirror, here, you missed all the fun.

2009-04-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

SYNDICATION NEWS

Over the weekend GlobalSecurity.Org was able to syndicate DD's blog at SITREP -- the Alexandria, VA-based national security information unit's daily blog.

A collection of recent columns, which you've already seen, are accumulated here.

For those with an interest in the mundane technical aspect, SITREP is capturing the feed produced by DD's Wordpress mirror here -- wheeled into action because of limitations and idiosyncrasies associated with Google's Blogger.

Thanks to GlobalSecurity's Francois Boo for putting all the pieces together.

Onward and forward into the glorious future.

2009-04-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

HAVING YOUR EYES OPENED

The daily news on methods of US torture and the Bush administration's legal justifications for its routine use as an instrument of national power can, at times, make it seem that our watchdogs were always on the ball.

Then reality snaps back in place.

So today DD will take readers back to when his eyes were opened to the bad faith and deceptions being thrown our way because it was convenient to the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror.

It was some time around mid-2004 when British researcher Duncan Campbell came to me for some advice with regards to what would become known as the London ricin trial.

In early January of 2003, British anti-terror forces had arrested seven men and allegedly "equipment needed to produce ricin and recipes for ricin, cyanide and several other poisons" at a Wood Green flat in the north of London, according to the BBC.

The British authorities called this Operation Springbourne and it continued to sweep up people said to be connected to a plot aimed at spreading poisons in London. One of the men grabbed in the raids is named Kamel Bourgass. During his arrest he stabs to death a British constable, a crime on which he will be convicted two years later and sent away for life.

Bourgass and four of these men are set in the dock for the London ricin case which was to be followed with another trial dealing with the rest of the alleged conspirators.

Campbell, who was working for the defense, had a stack of poison recipes, gathered from police raids and various other al Qaeda hideouts in Kabul and Kandahar which were part of the evidence to be used in the ricin trial. He sent electronic copies of them to me in Pasadena and we chatted back and forth over their impact and origins. In return, I sent back original materials of US nature from which these poison recipes were drawn.

I had been writing up analyses of ricin recipes found on the web and publishing them through GlobalSecurity.Org. Campbell had read them. And the ricin and other poison recipes were central to the UK government's case.

The prosecution wished to prove they were exclusive to al Qaeda, thereby establishing a link between the accused and the terrorist organization. But the recipes weren't exclusive. They originated in the US far right in the late Eighties and had been copied around the world, then translated to Arabic. Along the way they picked up minor differences in transcription and things added by individuals translating them. So the recipes seized in the UK ricin ring raids, all Kamel Bourgass's did not originate in al Qaeda hideouts. They were transcribed from Yahoo servers in Palo Alto.

However, before all this had been figured out, I was of the mind that the men in the dock, Algerians, were all going to be sent over. There was still a belief that the charges were probably based on reasonable assumptions. If Colin Powell, for example, had identified the London ricin ring, which he had called the UK poison cell, in his speech before the UN Security Council in September of 2003, there had to be something to it, right?

This was, Powell's presentation inferred, part of a web of terrorist intrigue stretching from Iraq and al Qaeda into Europe.

Well, a few months went by before the start of the trial and, gradually, things changed.

The evidence I was given was ridiculously trivial: Stupid Internet-cadged recipes for poisons, a puny amount of castor seeds -- 22, along with absurd ideas that one could make a cyanide weapon from a couple handfuls of cherry pits.

And I asked Campbell, in essence, what the heck was going on? This couldn't be serious. It was pathetic and lame. No one with half a mind could consider anything like this as part of a terrorist chain, connected with Iraq, which threatened the UK and United States.

I asked Campbell where the information came from on this poison team and the alleged Wood Green poison lab.

And then he told me about the UK government informant, Mohamed Meguerba, who'd been the source of it on the basis of a confession made while being held in a prison in Algeria. I was eventually told that Meguerba had been tortured into the confession and later recanted it and, so, the UK government was not going to be able to bring him to court to testify.

At that point the prosecution's case was badly hindered. A lot of the accusations rested upon getting a jury to believe statements of the informant. And then it was necessary to completely switch strategies.

It was at that point I became disillusioned. It had been shown that you couldn't believe anything the US government said. That Kamel Bourgass and his recipes for making poison from rotten meat or a handful of castor seeds to have taken the stage as a shadowy player in the hard sell the Bush administration used to drum up enthusiasm for war in Iraq was intellectually bankrupt.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman's blog at the New York Times republished quote from Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy News service.

"The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist," it read.

"Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

"The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."

With regards to the London ricin case, Meguerba's recanted confession about a ricin plot was apparently not part of a US operation. It was, however, still conveniently used by the Bush administration.

And there was a second man who'd been pressured into a handy confession, one which also connected with the alleged ricin poison ring.

In Colin Powell's slide purporting to show terror networks connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, a central spot is reserved for a man called Detained Al-Qaida Operative.

This was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

The US Senate's Select Report on Intelligence in Iraq revealed in 2006 that the CIA informed al-Libi that he would be handed over to a foreign government if he didn't talk. "[Al-Libi] decided he would fabricate any information the interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government.]"

Nevertheless, according to the Senate report al-Libi was also put in the hands of the foreign government. He was threatened with torture and then beaten up for fifteen minutes, after which he made up stories about al Qaida connections with Iraq, and nuclear and biological weapons programs.

Nevertheless, in January and February of 2003, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz cited it as one of a number of reasons for escalation to war in Iraq.

"The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested seven suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world's deadliest poisons, for which no cure exists," Cheney told the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. (In reality, no ricin had been discovered, just castor seeds. This information would be suppressed for another three years.)

"Make no mistake, America is at war," Cheney continued. "And the front lines are our centers of work, of transportation, of commerce, and entertainment ... We will also continue our efforts to stop the grave danger presented by Al Qaeda or other terrorists joining with outlaw regimes that have developed weapons of mass destruction to attack their common enemies — the United States and our allies. That is why confronting the threat posed by Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror. It is absolutely crucial to winning the war on terror."

And on February 6, Paul Wolfowitz added: "[We] see, for example, close connections between Iraqi intelligence, and even the Iraqi leadership, and this network that is actively working to do attacks with ricin and other deadly toxins. Some of them have been arrested in London. Some have been arrested in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. We're working on finding as many of them as we can. The problem is, some of them are hiding, probably effectively."

With regards to the London ricin case as I knew it, these statements were misinformation and fraud.

In September of 2004, the London ricin trial went forward. A gag order was imposed on the English press, one that lasted until the end of the trial in April of 2005.

The UK government's case had been irrevocably damaged. A jury eventually acquitted everyone but maniacal loner Kamel Bourgass.

Bourgass was locked up for life, also convicted on a charge of conspiring to cause a public nuisance with poisons.

"Does torture work?" is the question one now sees almost everyday. Yes, yes it does, reply various officials and Bush administration main men. It has kept us safe.

My take is that, yes, torture did work. It worked to provided convenient fictions which were in turn used to justify war with Iraq.

The result of the ricin trial -- acquittals and the realization among large portions of the English public that the original story had been all wrong, that there was not an extensive terror network of poisoners who had been trained by al Qaeda and were connected to Iraq -- was the start of the British public becoming disillusioned with George W. Bush's war. It led to an assumption that the fix was in.

In April of 2005, the American press more or less declined to cover the story. I had offered it to the New York Times. No one was interested.

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus covered part of it badly. In the process, he had to interview me and growled that I had put the newspaper in a difficult situation. Oh, DD had put the mighty WaPo in a difficult situation because I had found out the London ricin ring was bogus.

"Discovery that the initial ricin finding was a 'false positive' was made 'well before the outbreak of the war in Iraq,' on March 19, 2003, [George Smith] said," wrote Pincus.

Great job, that.

"A much-touted ricin-plot terrorism case in the United Kingdom ended in a muddled verdict today, raising new questions among U.S. officials about the ability of British authorities to secure convictions against major terrorist suspects," reported famous Newsweek investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball on April 15, 2005.

However, was this news that the Bush administration had been twisting information for its own aims?

No.

"The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that [Kamel Bourgass] and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot," continued Isikoff and Hosenball. "It also gives new urgency to the U.S. terror indictment brought against three other British suspects this week on charges relating to their surveillance of financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark."

And then Isikoff and Hosenball quoted the war on terror's well-known professional witness, Even Kohlmann, to cast the impression that a Brit jury had gone rogue and the justice system had failed.

From the Newsweek piece: " 'This is very disturbing,' says Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. government consultant on international terror cases, about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. 'These are dangerous people who are followers of Abu Hamza,' the radical imam of London's notorious Finsbury Mosque, which was a favored gathering place for Al Qaeda-linked extremists.' "

The US press couldn't bring itself to report all the nasty fine details. Instead, in 2005 it was still time to run with the rubbish story about a fantasy plot from the war on terror, one which turned out to have been the product of a healthy dose of maltreatment.

2009-04-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

A NEW LOOK

Today's first entry points you to DD's new WordPress blog here.

Why the mirror?

Blogger and Google.

For over a year Blogger has had instability issues with FTP publishing to servers outside of Google's domain. Whenever one least expects it, Blogger will throw a wobbly and report virtually meaningless error messages -- either your blog is taking longer than usual to publish, or a variety of error codes which, in my case, never reflect what's going on with FTP access to DickDestiny dot com. These are bugs and problems as any study of the Google Help forums devoted to Blogger quickly shows. However, Blogger -- while it sometimes seems to try and fix the faults -- never completely acknowledges that it has any.

But the straw which broke the camel's back was having this blog labelled as a spam blog by a Google Blogger anti-spam robot a week or so ago. When this happens, you receive an automated message in your e-mail informing that your blog will be deleted in twenty days. Unless you can convince Blogger its anti-spam robots, or whatever, have returned a false positive. In this e-mail, one is supposed to receive a link to appeal the process so that a human being will look at the blog and determine that it is not, in fact, the work of a dirty spammer.

This appeal link did not work.

My problem was not isolated. Through May, many other legitimate blogs were labelled as spam and threatened with deletion. Some fuse within Google Blogger had blown. And, so far, it has been chalked up as collateral damage in Google's valiant war against nefarious spammers.

The only recourse in this debacle was to publish the letters from Blogger in the Blogger Help forum, hope a human being higher up would read them, and dispense unstrained mercy. This may have worked for some. But with Blogger, it is always hard to know.

In any case, it's really not reasonable or acceptable that a Google property would be able to peremptorily delete two years of posts on this blog. (Theoretically possible, depending on the mechanism Blogger uses.) While the system is backed up, it doesn't change the fact that one has to consider the possibility that one's work will whimsically be destroyed by software automation one morning.

Ergo the need to start a mirror with the aim of eventually migrating the entire pattern of usage at this blog to WordPress. For the time being, this blog will still be the first to update, followed shortly by an identical post at the mirror.

This post, for obvious reasons, isn't going to be mirrored today.

2009-04-19T10:25:00.001-07:00

US MILITARY EMP FANATICS

Dreams die hard and a recent article from the journal IEEE Spectrum is a showcase for scientists trying to keep their electromagnetic pulse bomb projects alive for the Dept. of Defense.

A week or two ago DD revisited the phenomenon of US electromagnetic pulse crazies in two posts. The second of the two -- here -- dealt with the social crowd plagued with an Ahab-like obsession for deployable electromagnetic pulse bombs (not dependent on a multi-megaton fusion blast) and hand-held rayguns.

They regularly pop up in the news announcing fantastic weapons are about to arrive, or have arrived and been secretly used, or about to be tested. This has been a regular occurrence in the news, if not obvious to everyone, since around 1994 when the EMP lobby boffins began giving it the hard sell.

Readers will note the top listing from the Google link is a reprint of a cover story published in Popular Mechanics in 2001, an article predicting electromagnetic pulse bombs were about to show, possibly capable of throwing civilization back hundreds of years. If they found their way into terrorist hands. One also notes the piece is accompanied with a harsh critique from various punters.

"Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts," read a very recent piece of EMP crazy emission at the New Scientist a couple weeks ago.

"Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts! [Like] like man-made lightning bolts!" read a couple newspaper articles just before the second war with Iraq.

In every such article, a blizzard of jargon and promises.

For example, from Popular Mechanics: "An FCG is an astoundingly simple weapon. It consists of an explosives-packed tube placed inside a slightly larger copper coil, as shown below. The instant before the chemical explosive is detonated, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. The explosive charge detonates from the rear forward. As the tube flares outward it touches the edge of the coil, thereby creating a moving short circuit."

And the article from IEEE Spectrum is not much different. While e-bomb capabilities have been radically scaled back -- there is no mention of American civilization being returned to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or rayguns cobbled together by terrorists for the shooting down of airplanes -- they are still alleged to be relatively cheap and simple.

"This week at an arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., defense researchers are testing a new high-power microwave (HPM) bomb—one that creates an electromagnetic pulse capable of disabling electronics, vehicles, guided missiles, and communications while leaving people and structures unharmed," reads the website of the IEEE, dated April 15. "The tests mark the first time such a device has been shrunk to dimensions that could make it portable enough to fit in a missile or carried in a Humvee or unmanned aerial vehicle."

DD is going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if the weapon was tested last week, it was less than overwhelming, as usual. It has not been immediately obvious that the world was changed by an American revolution in weapons design.

The fundamental problem associated with non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons is simple to describe.

And it's never addressed, except through elliptical statements about limits of their "portability" and the ability to predictably "couple" the weapon's electromagnetic effect to a target. The problem is this: dispersion cripples such notional weapons, or as a scientist might say, any effect is constrained by the law of inverse squares. Nature's laws, fortunately for us, aren't subject to whimsical change.

"The intensity of the influence at any given radius r is the source strength divided by the area of the sphere," explains a page at a university physics department. "Being strictly geometric in its origin, the inverse square law applies to diverse phenomena. Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law. It is a subject of continuing debate with a source such as a skunk on top of a flag pole; will it's smell drop off according to the inverse square law?"

A bit of scientific humor, the latter bit about the skunk.

But there is never any humor associated with stories of electromagnetic pulse bombs. It is always deadly serious stuff.

"It’s a big deal!" said a scientist on the teat of Departmant of Defense electromagnetic pulse spending to IEEE. The EMP bomb is said to have been finally (maybe) shrunk to a size the military might be able to use. "The military would be able to actually use these."

And then there is the jargon-laden discussion about FCG's and vircators, and later, Marx generators.

"The 1.5-meter Texas Tech [EMP bomb] contains three main components: a power generator in the form of a flux compression generator (FCG), a microwave source called a vircator (for virtual cathode oscillator), and an antenna that radiates the resultant high-power microwave radiation," reads the piece.

"The FCG is like a battery that runs on a stick of dynamite," Michael Giesselmann, the weapon's developer at Texas Tech tells the reporter.

And the weapon, they can't resist, is simple and cheap, even though it's still not actually taking part in a real world test.

"The major advantage of an FCG is that it can be relatively cheap," says one expert from England, Bucur Novac, to the publication. "Depending on how big it is, from about US $100 for the 20-centimeter size to a few thousand dollars for the 1-meter size."

"It’s actually one of the simplest [EMP weapons] you can make," adds the bomb's developer.

Another problem associated with electromagnetic pulse bomb production is also easy to relate in common language. And this is why most electromagnetic pulse bomb scientists try to avoid it.

Since the bomb uses an explosive to generate an electromagnetic effect, if the explosive is too large, on the order of a conventional weapons, and the EM effect is trivial, the bomb is not non-lethal. It's just another high explosive bomb with fancy parts. If the explosive component is too small, the notional generation of its electromagnetic effect becomes weaker, requiring the weapon be much closer to its target upon detonation. If, theoretically, a weapon with the explosive power of, say, a stick of dynamite or two or three could generate an electromagnetic effect capable of frying the processor of a computer at ten or twenty feet, would you stand with the computer? Would you even care that such a thing could be demonstrated on a testing range at a US military installation?

Another way of looking at it is in the effect of a lightning bolt, another form of suddenly generated electromagnetic flux. If a lightning bolt hits your computer while you're sitting at it, it's a goner. And perhaps you are, too. But lightning bolts are not particularly cost effective weapons.

Readers see where DD is going. A megaton nuclear explosion creates a significant electromagnetic pulse. But it's rather secondary to the ... well, heh-heh, you know.

Near the end of the electromagnetic pulse bomb story, the EMP raygun system is also mentioned as a possibility. It could be used to stop cars, for instance.

"It requires a big truck to even bring the unassembled parts to the test army," says an Army overseer, a man with an unusually pragmatic air. This particular device "is not a consideration" for anything, ever.

Why the print space, then?

Well, consider that any theoretical electromagnetic pulse bombs are weapons which no longer have much use. Who would the US military sic them on? Somali pirates? The Taliban in Afghanistan? People living in buildings in Swat, Pakistan? Insurgents or rabble and crowds around the globe? Invading Martians?

In fact, the electromagnetic pulse bomb is not congruent with new defense priorities as recently discussed by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates.

And here one can speculate that this is exactly why an article about a test has been published in IEEE Spectrum. It is -- perhaps -- needed to show progress, to signal the existence of something in a program which has been funded for a very long time, one which has produced little but which might be coming to the end of its natural life. In another way of speaking, a press release by weapons developers afraid they may run short of DoD welfare.

2009-04-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

TORTURING EXCUSED, THE SEQUEL

Today's Los Angeles Times frontpage story on the Bush administration's torture documents was curious for one thing. It didn't use the word torture until almost the very end of the story (and not on the front page). Near the end, it reads: "The memo outlined an escalating series of interrogation methods sometimes used in concert, and was written months after the Justice Department had issued a December 2006 document that declared "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms."

Of course, this fine statement is accompanied by a sidebar containing descriptions of American-approved waterboarding, stress positions, cramped confinement, walling (throwing against a wall), and face slapping, among other things.

The Times goes onto describe torture under supervision of physicians: "[The document] also required that a physician be on duty in case a prisoner didn't recover after being returned to an upright position ... 'the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy ..."

The decision, the Times reported, "was met with criticism among conservatives and CIA veterans, who warned that the highly detailed documents would serve as a counter-interrogation training manual for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups."

This claim takes readers, and the American people, for fools. As has been repeatedly shown on this blog -- and in other places -- al Qaeda has long had materials in their manuals on what kinds of torture to expect. (See yesterday.)

In any case, human history has shown us there's very little one can do in the way of training to make one invulnerable to torture.

More succinctly, the complaints against revealing torture methods because it aids the enemy are an IQ test. If you accept them, you flunk. Here's why: If the United States really isn't in the business of torturing its prisoners anymore, as Barack Obama says, then putting the methods of torture in the sunlight aids the enemy not at all.

Link to story here. Not pointed at the LA Times because while the hardcopy of the newspaper is a delight, the online edition's load times are atrocious. In Tribune company's grasping for every last penny on the Internet, it has made the Times website one of the most unbearable, as a total bandwidth hog, on the Internet. By comparison, the New York Times seems almost as simple and clean as this blog.

2009-04-16T12:45:00.000-07:00

TORTURING EXCUSED

"The methods [in the torture memos included] keeping detainees naked for long periods, keeping them in a painful standing position for long periods, and depriving them of solid food," reported AP today.

"Other tactics included using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls, keeping the detainee's cell cold for long periods, and beating and kicking the detainee. Sleep-deprivation, prolonged shackling, and threats to a detainee's family were also used."

None of this was unexpected. What was a bit startling was a potentially blanket get-out-of-jail free card for those involved in implementing it.

Over the past years, articles on torture and the ramifications of it have been singularly unpopular on DD's blog. There are only a few in the pundit class and a handful of national newspapers or publications which are approved for the subject. Everywhere else, it's a recipe for losing eyeballs. Covering war-on-terror trials at The Register, for instance, was unpopular. Relatively speaking, few cared to see unpleasant stories, stuff with no moral or happy ending, about people being sent over on flimsy or virtually non-existent charges.

And so it will be this story again. Compared to a review of the Boxmasters or something about how awful Saturday night movies on the Sci-Fi channel are, it's a cooked snail. DD invites you to spread the URL. (That's already failed.) He dares you to brook annoying pals with another post on the boiled lead of torture and its consequences.

But now to the meat of the action.

DD republishes screen shots from the original manual of jihad in Afghanistan, presented to me as part of the parcel of evidence to be considered while doing research as a consultant to the trial of the alleged London ricin ring.

The manual, put together in the late Eighties, included sections on what jihadis could expect if they were taken prisoner by Middle Eastern governments. The United States, as I shall show, was excluded from this 'assessment.'

A sample:

Other methods included:

And:

It's not necessary to put a red check mark next to those which now align with methods used by the American government in the last few years. And it's equally stupid to grant any semblance of logic to semantic arguments about which methods are torture and which aren't. Those who wrote the manual of Afghan jihad considered them torture. They would, of course, consider American methods cited at the top of the post as torture. And sane people the world over would consider all of them torture, whether applied singly, in combination, or under a doctor's supervision.

The original jihad manual also included the following bit of information:

All of them -- Middle Eastern nations known as human-rights abusers. To which, on the say so of of panicked and fearful American leaders and the tacit acquiescence of a supine press and populace, we added ourselves. And thus forfeited our souls and the worldwide belief that our country was the side of unassailable right.

The original manual of jihad for you to see is here at Cryptome.

"The United States [was not mentioned in the manual's torture section]," wrote this blog two years ago. "One might reasonably think this was because it was a long way off from being regularly thought of as in the business of torturing captives."

At that time, the Bush administration was quoting from the manual of Afghan jihad for political purposes, speaking of a section in which al Qaeda discussed the legitimacy of beating and killing prisoners during interrogation. (See here and here.)

This was, George W. Bush said, proof of the evil of the adversary. What this was, more precisely and put in context, was part of a chain of events which defined the very essence of American national hypocrisy and shame.

More recently:

Tortured by ours or yours?

Which part of torture don't they understand?

2009-04-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

INTERNAL REVENUE BOOGIE

I got a letter from my Tax Man
To avoid big fines and a nasty jam
I had to work out a convenient payment plan

I saw the letter from my Tax Man
He had me banged up, I was body-slammed
I was fiscally blue

For your diversion, a rueful song of IRS trouble for tax day, the Internal Revenue Boogie.

Drawling shouted white boy blues rock, recorded two years ago by DD, right on time. C'mon now, you know that's a really slinky riff.

Misappropriated on the Net. Figures.

2009-04-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

CASUALLY MALICIOUS

"The current United States can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which all other things being equal, always wins," wrote author Paul Fussell in 1991 for his book, Bad. "No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere, and no wonder cover-up and bragging have become the favored national style."

DD used the paragraph to introduce his non-fiction tale on the computer virus underground in cyberspace, The Virus Creation Labs, three years later.

Virus Creation Labs was filled with characters like Michael Mooney of Winnfield, LA, identified as the creator of the StalkDaily computer worm and its variants used to plague Twitter and its users.

Bereft of any noticeable personality traits except a facility for casual malice and an air that he was the essence of cool, Mooney still fits the ISOO standard of many teenage virus-writers before him.

"When do you plan to deactivate the worm," a teenage editor asked Mr. StalkDaily.

"As soon as they [meaning Twitter] are able to sanitize their fields correctly, or promptly address me to remove it," he replied.

In the early days of virus-writing, many of their authors had the same mentality. They felt the targets of their viruses ought to address them personally, perhaps thanking them for illustrating how stupid they, as the victims, had been. "Would you, please, help me to remove it, oh great one?" they should ask, properly deferential.

From the Virus Creation Labs in 1994: "[Virus-writer] Screaming Radish bent my ear for three hours talking and talking and talking about ... how virus-writers should receive a share of anti-virus software company profits because it was by their actions that consumer products were improved."

Yesterday, StalkDaily Mikey claimed he felt really bad about angering people, contradicting himself in the next emission: "I feel pretty bad about it, but it’s not me that left the vulnerability out in the open."

It's the merciless logic of someone who, if he saw a pile of dry leaves and tinder in your yard would set it ablaze and watch your house catch fire, sadly and with tears in his eyes, because he was bored and you had not properly neutralized all fire hazards. (Need a less severe bit of symbolism? Think someone who exploits anything in the real world with feeble or non-existent security measures, like letting the air out of your tires, then keeps coming back until you lock your car in the garage every night and have a motion detecting spotlight installed in the driveway. Because your tires had a vulnerability that needed to be 'sanitized.')

Because viruses and worms can't be precisely controlled once they're put into the world, the StalkDaily Kid will continue to cause trouble, if even indirectly, for some time. Virus-writers are copyists at heart and they simply take code which has already been successful at creating some level of trouble and use it to create their own minor variations, for the purpose of starting the entire process again and having their bit of the action.

Perhaps the only good news that one can take away from people like Michael Mooney is that there is no shortage of them. Far from being unique or demonstrably superior intellectually, he's just another small sweaty dude in a hoodie who's not inclined to spend time dwelling on the consequences of whatever he has chosen to screw with. There is a silver lining here, of sorts, and it's this: If it were actually possible to sicken, injure or kill via malicious attacks launched through computers and the Internet, instead of merely creating cascading error, embarrassment and loss of time and money, tens of thousands of people would have been in the ground since 1994. And there might not even be an Internet or personal computer as you know it.

DD knows the StalkDaily Kids because, for a time, he fraternized with them. (See here for a bit of a backgrounder published in the Village Voice a few years ago.)

One germane part reads: "For a few years in the early '90s, the Crypt Newsletter published a stream of frequently brutish and malicious programs. Anyone could reconstitute them, easy as powdered milk. Through Crypt, I gathered experience in the applications of digitized badness and gained an ability to see it in the work of others, whether that of teenagers out for kicks or businessmen grasping at ways to retaliate against kids thought to be [pirating music on-line]. Crypt knew the textures and flavors of rotten in the machine world. It published a virtual landmine based on a useful program, only overturned and corrupted to harshly prune the directory tree of a disk. Booby traps were written to show filth to moochers of porn while, in the background, the machine was being fouled. Viruses multiplied slowly and, when finished, either displayed vulgar quotes, logged keystrokes, or played idiotic music."

One of DD's program, the Heevahava virus was simple, taking a half hour to come up with, at best. "[It] mocked the infected by associating them with its name [which meant 'dolt']."

"In one version, it obstructed efforts to unravel its instructions ... Face-to-face, an anti-virus software programmer threatened to punch me in the mouth at a security convention because the code protection had taken him hours to dissect, time he wished to spend with his family."

One can find much more of the same here.

Another chapter on old-timey virus writers.

Coincidentally, DD's Twitter feed

2009-04-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY AFTERNOON JUKEBOX

Cue list: The Boxmasters, The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation

Boxmasters girl: Dancing quim is here again.

"The Boxmasters are really a combination of the Beatles, the Monkees and the Turtles with Del Reeves and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard -- all put together."

That's quite a bundle of hooey from Billy Bob Thornton, delivered with the press from last year's Boxmasters double CD on Vanguard.

However, as something that was Bonzo Dog Band-esque -- a humorous, sardonic and loving take on music Thornton actually wished to play for people to hear, it was easy to get behind. Thornton said he was into Frank Zappa & the Mothers, too, which one also 'gets' if you knew and liked Cruising With Ruben & The Jets and FZ's talent for R&B.

With regards to the Bonzo Dog Band -- The Boxmasters didn't do -the English humour- at all. But the acknowledgement that one has to write catchy songs, good enough to maybe make Paul McCartney show up to play or produce under an alias, all the more to make the jokey stories stick, is. In place of English scouser, Thornton is a southern lower middle class/lower class heel, a character he was born to show us.

"The Poor House" -- the Boxmasters debut song, played infrequently in its video version on county music cable networks, was the debut's best. Its hook was undeniable and one could hear (as well as see if viewing the sent-to-Country Music Television version) Thornton mugging his way through the lyrics. "Shit List" and "I'm Watchin' The Game" were also sticky. The only quibble, and a small one, was often Billy Bob sounded as if reading lyrics from a teleprompter, a band with overplaying pedal steel player providing the backing. Part of this may have been intentional.

As for getting a sound like the Beatles vintage records, it's not precisely so. The spirit was right but the actual tone, while carefully vintage, didn't sound like a George Martin production. Boxmasters production was darker and buried in tape slap and reverberation that's truly Sixties, but much more USA than UK.

Thornton covered Mott the Hoople's "Original Mixed-Up Kid" in terrific manner but a version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," meant to be equally reverential, was ... well, it was what you'd expect from a band of hillbilly rednecks. One expected a cover of the Who's "The Kids are All Right" to blow, on paper seemingly a perfect recipe for crap. Astoundingly, it worked.

Billy Bob's voice was old time hardware store manager by day, pool hall and barroom singer by night. Segues plugged up the spaces between the tracks. It sounded like funeral parlor music, some old church organ, the tinny music of a roller rink, drums galloping off on a tangent, vocal muttering, snips of dialogue from a movie which Thornton was in, or maybe not. If Billy Bob, "Bud" for the Boxmasters, wanted you to laugh and tap your feet to his record, he succeeded.

For Modbilly, the Boxmasters' second double-CD effort (there was a Xmas special, too), Thornton gets to the Turtles, via a cover of "Elenore" and Del Reeves. Better is a ringing and wistful take on the Stones' "As Tears Go By."

For this one, much more chime and Merseybeat is furnished with somewhat less lap and pedal steel, making Modbilly less cornpone by a few degrees. And half the originals are about life loss and heartbreak, sincerely delivered.

"Heartbreakin' Wreck" and "That's Why Tammy Has My Car" now remind DD of Hee-haw and Roy Clark although TV would've never allowed for the profanity: "I'm a moron/I'm a dumbass" in the chorus of the latter, with the band gleefully seconding, "He's a dumbass!" Listen close on "Reasons for Livin'" and hear Billy Bob sing about liver disease and the venereal sore on his lip.

Once past the nods to the British Invasion, much of Modbilly sounds like The Outlaws' first record, less the two Les Pauls and one Strat going full throat which, tonally, changes things quite a bit. However, the delivery and taste in American roots music and Brit pop groups are similar. Songs in question: "New Mexico," "You Crossed the Line," "Santa Rosa" -- all could have been done by the Outlaws, which is to say some of Modbilly also sounds like New Riders of the Purple Sage -- only better.

Thornton's vintage rock and pop tones are all carved and in place. In promo pics everyone poses with their old Ampeg amps, including the unique flip-top one for bass. (Cuban boots are required.) There's a rack of Fender Telecasters, fitting the record's Duane Eddy twangy guitar tone. The box set comes with drink coasters printed with Tiger Beat-like profiles on their backs and a poster with the dancing girls.

"Fav Chicks:" Ann Margaret, Suzanne Pleshette, etc, they read, among other timely things. I did have such a crush on Suzanne. Is this not the very essence of fun?

On paper, the Boxmasters express great loyalty to the Monkees. Someone insists their favorite movie is 'Head,' stretching credulity (have you ever watched 'Head' at length without squirming or drinking too much? DD has -- more than twice) but is nonetheless entertaining to read. This is somewhat backed up by furnishing the complete with finger-snaps "Boxmasters Theme" at the end, meant to accompany a notional TV show.

Thornton must be single-handedly adding asterisks and change to Mike Nesmith's royalty statements from his singer/songwriter work apart from the Monkees. If there is a Mike Nesmith folk rock tribute band, Boxmasters is it.

In any case, half of the appeal of Boxmasters records is Billy Bob Thornton's knack for wry avuncularity. If you've half a brain, the stuff is genuinely funny, not only for the stories told but also for the image of the dapper and suited-up Sixties combo act (these boys look very clean), a group hopeful perhaps of getting on the Opry stage, with good songs about trying to get out of debt to the mob and being kicked out of the house for being a moron. Modbilly delivers much more sincerity than the debut. The Boxmasters have switched from being a US country rock version of the Rutles or the Stones or Herman's Hermits to a real band which color codes its guitars -- turquoise on the debut, pastel green on Modbilly, sunburst for the back cover art.

Choruses are delivered, half the time characteristically droll and chuckling, followed by sly Telecaster and drum fills in the turnarounds. There are no other records yet this year aimed so fanatically at thrilling the hard-to-reach 'over thirty' fans of the sound. Brad Paisley, who like Thornton is a conversational story-teller, needs to either hear the Boxmasters or take them on tour. But he may not want to. Modbilly is a better thing than Paisley's latest.

If you're wondering about the group name, DD once had a teenage close confidant in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky. He went by the name of 'Box.' Even though he had rotten teeth, 'Box' was so entitled for synonymity with quim, as in getting in it. OK? He was a flawed lady's man at eighteen, an object of awe at Pine Grove Area High School. Even when slippery or repugnant, some guys just have it.

Special message to Billy Bob: No one who knows anything's gonna believe Boxmasters are like Mott the Hoople until we get a few guitar lines ala Mick Ralphs, Luther or Mick Ronson. That said, Bud -- you oughta tell the publicists: "Guy Stevens produced Mott, sort of." Really Bud, you haven't yet delivered anything like 'Rock 'n' Roll Queen' or 'Death May Be Your Santa Claus' or the Ian Hunter as Bob Dylan shtick.

Also for your consideration, SPV's reissues of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, one of the combos from the British blues boom that didn't make it. Cover art all by Hipgnosis well before it was hip. The Retaliation imitated all the people that did better, often so good you can't tell it's not the originals. For a couple songs you swear it's Savoy Brown, for another Ten Years After, the production made to sound like Mike Vernon was providing perfection at the desk.

The first album (simply called The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation) has "Chevrolet" retitled as "Watch and Chain." Foghat, or rather the guys who were then the core of Savoy Brown, would get much more mileage out of it years later in American stadiums.

Dr. Dunbar's Prescription was their second and most successful. It looks like a psychedelic acid trip LP -- which probably sold most of the copies -- but it's still mid-tempo white boy blooz with a heavy dose of Lee Michaels-like Hammond organ. If you're a fanatic for this type of undercard small venue Brit stuff -- thumping lugubrious but also very hard man delivered blues rock with commanding singer, these reissues fill the bill. Competition was fierce and the success of Cream and Led Zeppelin in '69 guaranteed everyone wanted their piece of the action.

Liner notes are complete with standard assertions that the Retaliation was going down gangbusters at the Fillmores in 'Merica when the record company pulled the plug. Assuredly, that must have been so.