Doubt's Log

One of the not so good things about living out in Snoqualmie Ridge is that we share an exit with the north end of 18, a bypass around Seattle and frequent location for traffic backed up onto the highway, which has actually led to a number of accidents and I believe a few deaths. The government has done a lot of work on the exit, making everything two lanes, having left versus right turn lanes, etc. However the problem of all the traffic heading south on 18 from Eastbound I90 remained and cutting over at the last minute could get you some nasty honking and a ticket. Until a couple days ago that is. Thanks to some quick work, the right lane of the highway is exit only with the next lane an optional exit directly into the left turn lane.

The NIST has released a draft white paper on electronic voting machines. Washington Post summarizes:

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

...

NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

Fears about rigging have animated critics for years, but there has been no conclusive evidence that such fraud has occurred. Electronic voting systems have had technical problems -- including unpredictable screen freezes -- leaving voters wondering whether their ballots were properly recorded.

Computer scientists and others have said that the security of electronic voting systems cannot be guaranteed and that election officials should adopt systems that produce a paper record of each vote in case of a recount. The NIST report embraces that critique, introducing the concept of "software independence" in voting systems.

NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but such paper trails have had their own problems.

• Seymour Hersh documents the battle in between Bush'd administration and the military branches over Iran policy.
• Political slogans were once again turned in poor law, this time proving your citizenship for Medicaid.
• Hadman proves the point that "conservative judges" are more idoligical then constitutional. It's feels good to know that we haven't lost the american system of government yet. Yes it's easier to bypass the law when we don't like its consequences and possibities, but that is not the America most of us cherish so much. 

Happy July 4th!

Henry Lanman over at slate is discussing the ramp up of the federal governments use of the state secret privledge. While it's a fundamentally reasonable privilege, the ways it's getting used to block investigation of possible illegal behavior is worrying. It doesn't add confidence to learn that the original case in which the doctrine was confirmed by the Supreme Court turned out to be the Air Force using the tool not to safe guard secrets but to avoid damning proof of negligence.

Despite the burgeoning use of this privilege and the way it's been used to gut entire cases, the most disturbing aspect of the Bush administration's expansion of the state secrets privilege may well be this: More and more, it is invoked not in response to run-of-the-mill government negligence cases but in response to allegations of criminal conduct on the part of the government. These are not slip-and-fall cases. They are challenges to the administration's broad new theories of unchecked executive power. By using the state secrets privilege to shut down whole lawsuits that would examine government actions before the cases even get under way, the administration avoids having to give a legal account of its behavior.

Washington Post:
The state secrets privilege was invoked about 55 times from 1954 to 2001, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and in the first four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it was invoked 23 times.

It feels like the system is broken. The judicial branch and the legislative branches are already unable to keep up their end of the check and balances system, and yet there are some that continue to support a more powerful executive branch under the excuse of the war on terrorism?

On the other side of the coin, let's say that legislative and judicial branches did counterbalance with the result of a weaker State Secret privilege. This may be just as bad because there really are some things that need it. The administration still hasn't learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf. When you abuse a powerful tool, you lose that tool.

Whenever the next scandal comes around remember there are three sins bore from it. First is the scandal itself. Second is loss of trust of our leaders and institutions. Third is the damage done to our government in the abuses of power afterwards to stop the story or limit its damage.

By claiming state secret, we have more or less confirmed the Khalid el-Masri extraordinary rendition story. These extraordinary renditions make up sin one. The loss of soft power and public trust in us doing these things is sin two. Finally weakling the State Secret power in trying to use it (ineffectively) to cover up what was done is Sin three.

Which brings back a final note: One of the more sickening aspect of republican's current spin strategy is that it tries to assign blame of the second sin to the media and then focus on that as if the primary sin didn't exist and that the owner of the first sin has no responsibility for the second. This is my new concept is my new term for the day; when I hear another "Why is this media printing this!" comment, I will simply remember: The Second Sin

Here is a relativly concise and damning evaluation of the Iraq War by Anthony Cordesman of CSIS as posted on The Washington Note and linked to by Obsidian Wing:

"The Iraq War Three Years On: A Scorecard Anthony H. Cordesman

Let me preface the following points with the statement that I do not oppose the war, and that I believe we have an obligation to the Iraqi people to pursue our current strategy, to try to end the insurrection and prevent civil war, and help them create an inclusive and stable government.

I believe that we have made major advances in creating effective Iraqi forces, that the US Embassy is pursuing the best political approach it can in trying to create the government Iraq needs, and that we are making slow progress towards taking the aid process out of disastrously incompetent US hands in Washington and making Iraqis responsible for their own economic progress.

But, this should not blind us to the strategic consequences of the war to date. We may well fail in all our efforts because they came far too slowly, involved years of inept execution, and face a scale of problems that we still tend to deny. There is a real risk that Iraq will degenerate into full-scale civil war or a level of divisiveness that will paralyze or limit Iraq's progress for years to come.

It is also clear that creating a unity government with a small Sunni minority isn't going to stop the insurrection or risk of a major civil war during 2006, and perhaps for years to come. At best, it will take years to create a fully stable and functioning new political structure and defeat the insurgency.

As a result, I believe it is time to look quite frankly at the war in terms of how it has achieved it is original its objectives after three years, and consider what this means the need to avoid rushing into wars we do not really understand or prepare for in the future:

Objective One: Get Rid of Iraqi WMD Threat: Happened before the war. The main stated objective of the war was pointless.

Objective Two: Liberate Iraq: Security for the average Iraq is now worse, and the new political freedom is essentially freedom to vote for sectarian and ethnic divisions. Some progress to be sure, but much more limited than the Administration claims. It will be 2007-2008 at the earliest before stability can be established -- if it can. We essentially used a bull to liberate a china shop, without any meaningful plan to deal with the consequences. We have tried to fix the resulting problems, but we still don't know whether we can salvage our early mistakes.

Objective Three: End the Terrorist Threat in Iraq: There was no meaningful threat in the first place. Neo-Salafi terrorism now dominates the insurgency and is a far worse threat. Al Qaida now has serious involvement in Iraq. The impact on the region has alienated many Arabs and Muslims and has aided extremists. It has given Iran leverage that has added a new risk of Shi'ite extremism.

Objective Four: Stabilize the Gulf Region and Middle East: The war has been extremely divisive. It has created a major new source of anger against the US and new tensions over the US presence. Iran, Turkey, and neighboring Arab states have all become involved in destabilizing ways.

Objective Five: Ensure Secure Energy Exports: There have been consistently lower Iraqi exports than under Saddam. The predicted increases in Iraqi production have never occurred, and will not for years to come. There has been no meaningful renovation of oil fields and export facilities and serious further wartime disruption. The previous problems have spilled over into the other Gulf exporting states.

Objective Six: Make Iraq a Democratic Example that Transforms the Middle East: Iraq is not a model of anything. Public opinion polls in region show that our efforts at reform to date have created new Arab fears of US, and distrust of US efforts at reform in other countries.

Objective Seven: Help Iraq Become a Modern Economy: The flood of wartime, oil for food, and aid money has put tens of billions of dollars into the Iraqi economy and raised the GDP and per capita income on paper. So have record oil revenues. Even the latest US quarterly report, however, has oil not only dominating the GDP, but rising as a percentage in the future. Most new businesses are shells, starts ups or war related. Youth unemployment easily averages more than 30% nationwide and is 40-60% in the trouble Sunni areas. As yet, no meaningful sectoral reform in agriculture, state industries, or the energy sector. A shift to focused short term aid and letting the Iraqis manage more of the money may help, but largely a wasteful, highly ideological and bureaucratic failure.

In short, being a superpower is not enough. Fighting wars requires both a realistic grand strategy and the ability to implement it.

We may salvage the Iraq War on a national level, but there is little or no chance of salvaging the war in terms of our broader strategic objectives."

Greenwald is laying out points that he thinks people should make when explaining the NSA program. His first is this:

"(1) The President is now claiming, and is aggressively exercising, the right to use any and all war powers against American citizens even within the United States, and he insists that neither Congress nor the courts can do anything to stop him or even restrict him."

Greenwald begins by saying that he thinks the issue is best described in this way, rather than as an issue about the rule of law. If we make it about the rule of law, the administration will be able to trot out its legal justifications, everyone will get confused, and the whole thing will just seem like an arcane legal disagreement. Far better, he says, to explain clearly what their legal theory is, and why it is genuinely radical and frightening. He then does exactly that.

"The Administration's position as articulated by Gonzales is not that the Administration has the power under the AUMF or under precepts of Article II "inherent authority" to engage in warrantless eavesdropping against Americans. Their argument is much, much broader -- and much more radical -- than that. Gonzales' argument is that they have the right to use all war powers of which warrantless eavesdropping is but one of many examples against American citizens within the country. And not only do they have the right to use those war powers against us, they have the right to use them even if Congress makes it a crime to do so or the courts rule that doing so is illegal.

Put another way, the Administration has now baldly stated that whatever it is allowed to do against our enemies in a war, it is equally entitled to exercise all of the same powers against American citizens on American soil.

Barbara Forest speaks on Science Friday about the recent Dover rulling on Intelligent Design. Two key things I want to remember from this chat. One the notion of falsabilityis important for scientific theory. The second is that many of the creationists out there on school boards are pushing stuff specifically because they want to advance religion in the classroom without event understanding what they are pushing.

I think I might be getting a bigger clue to the right left divide post 9/11. For many republicans the main focus changed; liberty, morality, constitutional originalism took a back seat to the war on terrorism, and it is quite literally one war to them. I've understood this before but I didn't actually believe it. The same people who so readily condemn the things that happen under dictators and communism excuse some of the same behaviors done by the US as long as it can be defended under the word terrorism. The root logic is survival. Almost any principle can be sacrificed if it even remotely can be tied back to their safety. To me these words still seem harsh, but that is always the root aspect of the arguments. “If it prevents the loss of a major American city, would you say no?” I believe there is a fundamental cowardliness underlying this type of thinking; that our country has been reduced down to just the people in it, all the rules and ways we relate to each other are not enshrined values and principles but things that can be cast aside at the first hint of fear since they are just obstacles to an effective defense. I guess it is this downgrading of us from human to animals in the governmental sphere that drives so many people to get religion back into it. It is so much sadder that the real messages and meaning of religion has been hijacked into a war on the symbols. The religious right has decided that the latest worthy fight is what way retailers wish people a happy holiday season. If that is what religion means to them, they have lost all religious meaning completely. It seems to me to be that the fundamental position of the right in response to 9/11 is to be as much like our enemy as possible; torture as a tactic, drive religion into the public square, and a super powerful executive branch. Their message to the troops who defend us is that they are not defending the US anymore but just the collection of people who are (legally) sitting between Canada and Mexico.

Mr. Rose of Foreign Affairs in a NyTimes Editorial “Get Real“ talks about the back and forth between idealists and realists, and claims that the pendilum has now swung back to the realist camp.

SEVEN months into George W. Bush's second term, it is clear that whatever his expansive second Inaugural Address may have promised, American foreign policy has taken a decidedly pragmatic turn. In practice, the Bush administration has recently begun to pursue interests rather than ideals and conciliation rather than confrontation.

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The real story is simpler: the Bush doctrine has collapsed, and the administration has consequently embraced realism, American foreign policy's perennial hangover cure.

Schneir points me to an excellent interview at the American Conservative about suicide terrorist attacks with Robert Pape, professor at the University of Chicago.

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

...TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?

RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.

There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.

...TAC: There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?

RP: Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.

...TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?

RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition.

What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.

That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.

Slate put together a primer on American interrogation practices under Bush's War on Terror. I have to admit I'm pretty impressed, it ties together the many dispurate stories, events and people in a pretty typical summary story format like the “Chain of Command” page, but goes beyond that with links to the many different source articles and inlined source documents.

• Npr has a story on Donald Knuth
• Nytimes' Kristof laments about the state of environmentalism, he is looking for a less alarmist more responsible movement
• In spite of lower value of the dollar, the trade deficit hits it's second highest figure ever
• Scheneier points out that the Unicode community is thinking more about security in this draft report

While talking about fingerprinting students on Buses, Schneier gives us five questions to use to evaluate Secuirty Countermeasures:

• What assets are you trying to protect?
• What are the risks to these assets?
• How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?
• What other risks does the security solution cause?
• What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?

• NY Times WrapUp
• A New York painter, Steve Mumford, has been embedded with military units in Iraq on and off since April 2003. Also check out the artist's website.
• Energized by electoral wins, conservative Christians are pushing ahead state and local initiatives on controversial issues.
• Delegates from more than 190 countries have gathered in Argentina to celebrate the enactment of the Kyoto Protocol.
• The hunt for Osama bin Laden is stalled, frustrated by remote topography and sidetracked by the war in Iraq.
• The Air Force is sharply expanding its airlifts of equipment and supplies to bases inside Iraq to reduce the amount of military cargo normally hauled in ground convoys.

I'm starting with Vietnam because it's so fresh right now between the swift boats vets allegations and the bush AWOL thing.

It's difficult how to judge how important this issue is for me other then how it will role up into the character category. Kerry went to Vietnam, Bush avoided it.

While in Vietnam, Kerry did a pretty good job showing a bit more then courage then the norm as demonstrated by the medals he earned. The swift boats folks attack just doesn't come off as credible. Many members have historical sour grapes, conflicting testimony between previous statements of the members, where the attacks where financed from, conflicts from other veterans who where there and all the written records backing up Kerry’s version. The exception is Cambodia, which frankly comes down to statements from a decade ago, technicalities about where the border was and has no barring on Kerry's hero image.

Post war, Kerry made statements that, reading the congressional testimony and watching a Kerry/Paul O'Neil debate from the time, I feel are largely accurate and doesn't warrant the “all veterans are horrible war criminal“ claims that other veterans have hated Kerry for.

The swift boats vet attack has extra bad points for Bush. Contrary to his claims of not being involved, it follows a line of attacks that Bush and his supporters have used in the past with opponents. This combined with his attempts to change the subject with 527s whenever asked about the issue is plain disappointing.

The Bush AWOL story has shown to be over hyped, Bush had preferential treatment to get into the Texas Guard and didn't treat his commitment very seriously in the last couple years, exactly how he choose to blow off his commitment and the fact that he did cram sessions in the end resulting in a (possibly influenced) honorable discharge doesn't change much.

With the end of the Republican and Democrat conventions, I believe that both sides have stated their cases and it is a reasonable time to dig through the data and choose a side to elect. In preparation for this decision, I'm going to go through all the topics at play and state my opinions. These are in order of when they hit my head, not in order of importance.

• 9/11
• Afganistan
• Iraq
  • PreWar
  • War
  • Current
• Iran
• North Korea
• China
• Saudi Arabia
• Homeland Security
• Economy / Tax Changes
• Environment
• Healthcare
• Budget
• Foreign Trade
• Civil Liberties
• Intellectual Property
• War on Terrorism
  • Strategy
  • Detainees
  • Patriot Act
• Foreign Policy Styles
• Vietnam
• Character
• Campaign Style/Rhetoric
• Abortion
• Gay Marriage

Am I missing anything?

On the geek front, we have a nice little blog geek ditty sung to the Milshake song.

NYTimes stories and editorials I'm reading this morning:

• Israeli Court Orders Changes to Barrier in West Bank
  The Israeli Supreme Court today said the route of the country's West Bank separation barrier is causing too much harm to the local Palestinian population.
• Thousands of Protesters in Hong Kong Take Aim at Beijing
  Tens of thousands of protesters on Thursday challenged Beijing's refusal to allow them to elect their own leaders. 
• Dude, Where's That Elite? (By BARBARA EHRENREICH)
  With Michael Moore as the left's most visible spokesman, it's time to retire the "liberal elite" label.
• Those Were the Days (By BRUCE BARTLETT)
  The publication of Bill Clinton's memoirs has led many conservatives to reassess their memories of his presidency.

And some NPR Morning Edition stories:

• After Several Lean Years, States See Revenue Surpluses
  Last year, many U.S. states found themselves in serious financial straits. This year, tax revenues are up, and more than half the states have a budget surplus. But their budgetary woes are far from over. NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.
• Cassini Becomes First Craft to Enter Saturn's Orbit
  After a six-and-a-half-year journey, NASA's Cassini spacecraft becomes the first to enter Saturn's orbit. The bus-sized spacecraft will spend the next several years exploring the planet, its rings and its moons. NPR's Richard Harris reports.
• Ear Surgeries Seek to Heal Painful Saddam Legacy
  Among the legacies of Saddam Hussein's reign are the thousands of Iraqis with missing or mutilated ears. Slicing off an ear was standard punishment for army deserters. Now the new Iraqi government is footing the bill for ear replacement surgery. NPR's Emily Harris reports.

The NyTimes has a op-ed by Bob Herbert about how the insurance agency is cooking up a crisis about medical liability.

The A.M.A. has its crisis states marked in red on a map of the U.S. on its Web site. One of the red states is Missouri. But a press release in April from the Missouri Department of Insurance said, "Missouri medical malpractice claims, filed and paid, fell to all-time lows in 2003 while insurers enjoyed a cash-flow windfall."

Another red state on the A.M.A. map is New Jersey. Earlier this month, over the furious objections of physicians' representatives, a judge ordered the release of data showing how much was being paid out to satisfy malpractice claims. The judge's order was in response to a suit by The Bergen Record.

The newspaper reported that an analysis of the data showed that malpractice payments in New Jersey had declined by 21 percent from 2001 to 2003. But malpractice insurance premiums surged over the same period. A.M.A. officials told me yesterday that they thought the New Jersey data was "incomplete," but they did not dispute the 21 percent figure.

While I've heard some things about there not being a corelation between medical tort reform and medical insurance premiums. It's intresting to note that the low instrest rates that we have used to boost up the economy has the downside effect of putting pressure on premiums.

There is no question that malpractice insurance premiums have increased sharply over the past few years. In some instances they have skyrocketed. But, as the Congressional Budget Office has noted, there are a variety of reasons for that, including the cost of malpractice awards, decreases in the investment income of insurance companies and cyclical factors in the insurance market.

"Insurance companies' investment yields have been lower for the past few years," the budget office said in a report in January, "putting pressure on premiums to make up the difference.