Northman's Fury

Toronto police performed a controlled detonation of three bombs in an isolated waterfront area on Friday after transporting the devices from the city's east end amid heavy security.

. . .

Police took the extraordinary step of closing off a major roadway to transport the bombs and perform the controlled detonation at about 3 p.m. ET. A large plume of smoke rose from the site.

. . .

Adel Arnaout, 37, of Toronto, has been charged with three counts of attempted murder, three counts of intending to cause an explosion, and possession of explosives for an unlawful purpose, police said. He was scheduled to appear Friday in a Toronto court.

All in all, something that sounds like it would be a major story. I checked over at memeoradum to see if anyone was talking about it and I found a story about a couple of Egyptian students in Florida being arrested for explosive-related charges that's being linked to by a group of right-wing blogs.

Two Egyptian students at the University of South Florida were indicted Friday for carrying explosive materials across states lines and one of them was charged with teaching the other how to use them for violent reasons.

Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24, an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based university, faces terrorism charges for teaching and demonstrating how to use the explosives.

Looking around other news sites, I don't see the Toronto story being carried widely, if at all. I'm betting this Florida story will get far greater coverage despite the fact the Arnaoult had actually carried out attacks and was arresting while carrying working explosives.

Admittedly, Arnaoult's actions probably were personal and not terrorism related, but I have to suspect that if his name happened to be Muhammad Yousef, this would be getting a lot more attention then it actually is.

Pilgrims on the Vatican's new chartered airline have been told to leave holy water behind for security reasons.

Officials at Tarbes-Lourdes airport in southern France said that bottles of water from the shrine at Lourdes could present a potential terrorist threat.

Another example of just how ridiculous some of these security measures actually are. Creating an explosive by mixing various liquid components together is nearly impossible to begin with. Despite that, I can understand banning liquids that can't be easily identified, but banning water just takes things past the point of stupidity.

It does allow me the chance to share an amusing anecdote, however.  A friend of mine decided to try and get around said liquid ban by taking his larger bottle of water and tossing it in the freezer for the night, presenting it at the security gate as a solid block of ice.  Despite arguing his case that the ban is on liquids and that the bottle didn’t contain any, or at least very little, liquid at that point, they still confiscated the bottle.

A foreseeable outcome, of course, but I can’t help but admire the effort.

From the New York Times

Nuclear Agency Sees Progress on Iran

The International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday reported ''significant'' cooperation from Iran with its nuclear probe and noted that Tehran had slowed uranium enrichment -- assessments that could hamper U.S. hopes for new U.N. sanctions.

And from the New York Times

Iran Expanding Its Nuclear Program, Agency Reports

Iran is expanding its nuclear program in defiance of United Nations’ resolutions, even as it has promised to answer questions about an array of suspicious nuclear activities in the past, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday

Yep, both stories about the same IAEA report and published in the same paper on the same day.

The BBC is asking the same question I did this morning. Not too much new there, but this line certainly caught my eye.

Mark Fitzpatrick, nuclear analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London said: "There is a real possibility that President Bush will feel compelled not to allow this problem to pass to his successor.

Really?  Let’s think about that for a moment.  Conventional wisdom puts Bush as the President who will probably be passing on more problems to his successor than any other in history, possibly excepting the folks preceding Lincoln, not to mention that anyone with more than a few working brain cells would tell you that launching a military strike against Iran will create worse problems to pass on to his successor, not solve anything.

It's actually that point, and the fact that the people around Bush may be so selfish, so partisan, or so past the point of caring, that they will launch the attack just to ensure that the person coming in after them will have the worst possible hand when they get behind the desk in the oval office, that makes me continue to rate the possibility of an attack quite highly.

When people have nothing left to lose, they will do things normally beyond them, and that rarely benefits the rest of us.

With Bush again warning the Iranians about their alleged support of Iraqi militias, the study saying the US is preparing for a massive military strike against Iran, and the arrest of seven Iranians in Baghdad yesterday, it certainly feels like the war drums are picking up there pace.

The problem is that this has happened before several times, only to settle back down into the background. I'm beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf. Will this time be different? Will the escalation finally paint somebody into a corner and make war inevitable, at least in their minds?

I don't know. But given the consequences, it is certainly something to keep an eye on.

Given that Afghanistan has manged to again produce a record crop of opium, I thought a post on the drug trade may be appropriate.

The US has spent billions of dollars on its War on Drugs, and the results so far have been counterproductive on every front.

According to the Washington Post, BC now has more organized crime syndicates than anywhere else in the world.  That’s applying a very broad definition to the term “crime syndicate”, but then the federal government in the US defines people licensed by states like California to grow marijuana for medicinal purposes crime syndicates, so I suppose anything is possible.

An attempt by our government to decriminalize possession of marijuana was met by threats from the Americans, promising harassment of Canadians at the border and interruptions in cross-border trade. 

The focus on prohibition and punishment for possession in the US has led to them having the highest prison population on the planet.  Despite this, drug use continues to increase.

Paranoia over pot is so high in official circles that the US is the only country in the world where it is illegal to grow industrial hemp.  The argument usually given is that high-THC cannabis would be hidden within the legal crop, though in reality, the likelihood of cross-pollination with the low-THC industrial hemp would make such areas amongst the worst to grow a drug crop.

Legalization is given as a solution for many of the problems the Drug War has caused domestically.  While I do support legalization for marijuana, I can at least understand the reason behind banning some of the harder drugs, but prohibition is certainly not working.  It is only increasing the profit margins for traffickers.

And on the international stage, for too much effort is put into attacking farmers and other people who produce crops that can be turned into drugs rather than focusing on ways to divert the crops from drug production.

The article in the Post is remarkable for its litany of failures in the US drug wars.  The long-time support from the US for the eradication of coca production in Columbia is a good example.  $4.7 billion spent from 2000-2005 alone, 98% on eradication efforts, and 70% of it in the form of US-manufactured military equipment.

The result:  Coca cultivation growing from 6 to 24 provinces of Columbia’s 32, cocaine supply increasing every year and the wholesale price decreasing year-over-year for the entire multi-decade span of the program.   Hardly a success story.

FARC, the 17,000 man terrorist army, controls an area the size of Switzerland and draws support from the peasants whose crops and villages are sprayed by pesticides by US planes.  The plan is particularly harsh in that in targets areas known for coca production, but doesn’t bother to check and see which farmers may have legitimate crops in the area.  This form of collective punishment allows FARC to portray themselves as defenders of the local population, which is how they have maintained their presence throughout the US campaign.

And now the US has decided that this brilliant strategy is also the one they should attempt in Afghanistan, regardless of the fact that the Afghan government and some of their allies like the British don’t approve of it.  (Anyone believing in the fiction that we’re over there defending a sovereign Afghan government can try explaining this power dynamic.)

I’ve argued before that the best way to approach the situation in Afghanistan is to use the example of Turkey and legalize the poppy crop for use in painkillers such as morphine.  The US actually supports that program with considerable funds, though with very little coverage.  Poppy farmers make ten times what they could growing alternative crops, just as coca farmers in Columbia make more per acre with that crop.  Both crops have legitimate uses outside the illegal drug trade, and in both cases, it is not the farmers but the traffickers who make the real money from turning the crop to illegal uses, but it is the farmers and not the traffickers who are for some reason the focus of the American campaign.

Given the other major war on a noun happening in Afghanistan right now, the way the US decides to fight the drug war there has consequences far beyond the ever increasing poppy cultivation and drop in heroin prices worldwide which marks their effort being every bit the success Plan Columbia has been.

By focusing on the farmers, and by using heavy-handed military tactics to destroy their livelihoods, it allows the traffickers and Taliban, who are making the real money, to ride in as the saviours of those whose crops are destroyed, and as defenders of the people for those whose crops are at risk.  That, in addition to the rightful anger at those who are trying destroy their farms, means that the local populations are unwilling to provide intelligence to the international forces at best, or are willingly supporting or carrying out attacks against those forces at worst.

I'm conservative by nature and abhor waste. By that measure alone the War on Drugs is a disaster. But it gets even worse when the strategy actually undercuts far more important missions like the one in Afghanistan and makes the already miniscule chance we have at succeeding over there virtually impossible and leads to our soldiers dying to support a US strategy that targets Afghan farmers rather than Taliban fighters, and that the supposed Afghan government we're there to give legitimacy and support to opposes itself.

The Drug War isn't just wasteful; it's insane, and somebody needs to bring some sanity back to the policies.

Cross-posted to BlogsCanada: E-Group

Two-thirds of US adults admit to being in the dark about political issues outside the United States, and only a third are well-versed in US politics, the results of a poll published Tuesday showed.

. . .

Global political knowledge was miniscule, with just three percent of women and 14 percent of men saying they are extremely knowledgeable on world politics.

One reason for the knowledge gap is lack of interest, according to the poll.

"Well over half (57 percent) say they do not like learning about political issues in other countries," and 32 percent expressed a lack of interest for homespun politics, the Harris Poll group said.

And I get the feeling a lot of the guys were exaggerating. This wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for the fact that the US has a tendency to invade other countries on a not infrequent basis.

If there has ever been another country in history that has managed to amass such power and have such faith in their ability and right to rule the globe while simultaneously being both ignorant and uncaring about what that entails, I have never came across it.

It does explain a few things, though. While Mr. Stereotypical American may wonder, "Why do they hate us?", he isn't interested in learning the reason. Just go bomb some more people and hope it makes things better.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, will likely testify to Congress about progress in the war on September 11 or September 12, the White House said on Monday.

Of course, I'm sure the holding of Congressional hearings on the status of an increasingly unpopular war on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is just a big coincidence. No nefarious pandering here. And to think, some people believe the Bush Administration is still trying to link the 9/11 attacks with the Iraq War in people's minds.

There is a story in the Washington Post regarding a move by the US Defense Agency to hire private contractors to gather and analyze intelligence data. While that all kinds of issues about privacy and security, there was one point at the bottom of the article that really caught my eye, (and why is it that the important information always seems o be at the end of articles?)

The committee questioned the additional costs involved in using contractors, citing an estimate that a government civilian employee costs on average $126,500 a year, while the annual cost of a core contractor, including overhead and benefits, is $250,000.

Many companies that provide contract workers to the CIA and Pentagon intelligence agencies are headed by former employees of those agencies. For example, Abraxas, which is run by a former CIA case officer, has hired -- and then contracted out to the government -- more than 100 former intelligence employees over the past six years.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. It is pretty much a running joke that the way to real wealth is to quit your government job and get hired back as a consultant to do the same thing.

One of the main arguments for outsourcing or privatizing government services is the contention that the private sector can do the job more efficiently and therefore cheaper. The truth is usually neither, and even if the first turn out to be true in some cases, it only means a greater profit margin for the companies, not cheaper costs for customers.

Hiring an outside contractor to do work is always going to be more expensive than finding an employee that can do the same task. That said, there is an argument to be made for hiring contractors to do work. The key is in ensuring that the work is of a temporary nature. If a position requiring considerable expertise is unfilled, hiring a contractor to fill in while a candidate is found can be beneficial.

The other use is usually for short-term projects that it wouldn't make sense to hire a full-time employee for. This is more common and also more problematic if the situation isn't closely watched. Some consultants have a tendency to use the knowledge gained while working on the project they were hired for to find or create more work for themselves and therefore keep the gravy train going. IT contracts tend to be notorious for this, in no small part because the knowledge base for such work is quite limited and because once you've installed a custom program, the only people who can service it are usually the people who did the installation.

Basic rule of thumb for this is: Hire employees to do the work in house for all but the most transitory of tasks. It will save you , and the taxpayer, money.

A couple of interesting stories regarding Russia and east Asia and the prospects of a new Cold War. The first is the Russian announcement that it will be resuming the Cold War practice of sending strategic heavy bombers on long patrols and buzzing NATO and US bases.

The second, and more interesting in my book, has to do with where the announcement was made; in the midst of an SCO joint military exercise. While the SCO is a long way from becoming a replacement to the Warsaw Pact, it is also looking like it may become more than a merely economic alliance. It certainly has the ability to act as a counterweight to the US and the EU, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to the observer states of India, Pakistan, and Iran. Their joining would make the SCO less likely to become a military alliance, but it would also certainly play havoc with US plans for the region.