Tragedy in Jakarta

Posted on September 10, 2004

My heart goes out to the people of Australia, who are suffering from a tragic terrorist attack against their embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia that killed nine people and wounded more than 180 yesterday.

The blast was the work of one of the most active Islamist terror groups in the world, Jemaah Islamiyah. Among JI’s other atrocities are the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that killed 202 people, and the 2003 bombing of the J.W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta that claimed another 12 lives.

JI was also the group that notorious terrorist Hambali called home. Hambali was an associate of Osama bin Laden before his capture in 2003.

This terrible attack adds another stain to the already sordid history of JI. The people of Australia deserve some room in our thoughts and prayers today.

Update

Posted on September 8, 2004

Here’s an update on my status, since I haven’t posted in a while.

As of yesterday (Tuesday, Sep. 7), I’m back in DC. My mother’s condition has, thankfully, stabilized. She’s still on the ventilator — it takes a while to get the remaining lung to “learn” how to do all the breathing on its own — but every day they ease back the ventilator settings a little and she responds well, so it’s been a story of slow but steady improvement. Which is something to be thankful for. (Since the doctors have no idea how long she’s going to need the ventilator for — could be days, could be weeks — my family and I decided that I should probably come back to DC once it seemed like the emergency was over, rather than burning even more time off that I don’t have waiting for a breakthrough.)

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that things keep going as well as they have been. Oh, and plow through the backlog of work that accumulated while I was out of the office for a week. And deal with a weird not-a-cold-exactly-but-it-makes-me-tired-and-sneezy cold I seem to have picked up, most likely from spending too much time hanging around the hospital.

So. Forward!

What I’ve Been Up To

Posted on August 31, 2004

You may be wondering why the blogging has been light recently.

It’s because I’ve been dealing with a bit of a family emergency.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother complained to her doctor of having respiratory problems. The doctor did some tests and discovered a spot on her lung that turned out to be a malignant tumor. Additional tests indicated that the tumor was operable and hadn’t spread into the bone, so last week they went in to remove the tumor.

To make a long story short, once they got in there they found out it was more complicated of a situation than they thought. The end result was that they could only remove the tumor by taking the entire lung with it. This isn’t a great outcome, but it’s not the end of the world either — you can live just fine on one lung, as it turns out.

That is, you can if the remaining lung continues to work reliably after they wheel you out of the operating room. And my mom’s didn’t: two days after her surgery (this would be last Friday) her condition deteriorated in a fairly frightening and dramatically rapid fashion. The next morning, my father told me that I should probably come out to Ohio to be with the family, just in case the deterioration didn’t stop — so I booked a flight and four hours later I was on a plane home. (One way ticket to Dayton: $65. Thank you, Independence Air!)

I had only been in the house for a couple of hours when the hospital called, telling us to get down there right away: her condition was getting worse again. We rushed over there and listened to the doctor as he told us the news: they had her hooked up to a ventilator to do her breathing for her, since her remaining lung wasn’t doing it, and this had stabilized her — but by this point the ventilator was maxed out, and she was only just barely getting the total amount of oxygen she needed to stay alive. If she didn’t rally, he explained, “we really don’t have anywhere to go from here.” All we could do was hope and pray that this was the worst it would get.

We were in the hospital until 2 in the morning that night. She didn’t backslide any further, so it seemed the immediate danger had passed and after talking with the medicos we decided to go home and try to sleep. I can’t speak for my father and my brother but I know I was pretty well convinced, that night, that it was only going to be a matter of time until we lost her. (If you saw the looks on the nurses’ faces as they tended to her, you’d know why I felt that way.)

Then, apparently, a minor miracle happened: that night was as bad as it got. After they got her condition stabilized by maxing out the ventilator, she held stable for the rest of the night and the next morning, and they gradually started easing back on the ventilator to let her lung start to take up some of the slack. The process of ramping down the ventilator is a slow one — as I write this it’s been three days since that night, and the ventilator has only come down to providing 60% of the pressure in her lung, from the 100% it was giving when things looked darkest — but ever since, she has been slowly but steadily improving.

It’s waaay too early to say that things are all good — she’s still hooked up to a huge bundle of machinery in the ICU, with her whole body paralyzed (they give some ventilator patients paralytic medications to keep their body from struggling against the ventilator’s respiration cycle), and nobody can say how things are going to turn out in the end. But when you consider that just a few days ago the doctors were essentially writing her off, and now they’re willing to start talking ballpark figures about when she could leave the ICU — well, you can understand why we take our optimism where we can find it.

Her recovery from this is going to be a long one — but any recovery is better than none at all.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. So you’ll have to understand if I’ve been a little tardy on the blog front.

P.S. If you smoke, let me know so I can send you pictures of what it looks like to be unconscious and hooked up to a Goddamned ventilator while your loved ones bawl their eyes out in the waiting room over the thought of you dying before you reach 55. Maybe that will help you understand what’s in that crap you’re sucking down, even if the Surgeon General’s Warning can’t.

GBV Wraps It Up

Posted on August 24, 2004

Goddamn it.

Michelle Malkin: The “Poor Me” Tour

Posted on August 24, 2004

Media Matters for America has the gory details of Michelle Malkin’s therapeutic appearances on several conservative media outlets to try and heal the psychic scars left by her run-in with real journalism:

As a guest on Hardball, Malkin claimed that Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis — the two veterans who were on the swift boat under Kerry’s command in Vietnam the night Kerry received the injury that resulted in his first Purple Heart — had accused Kerry of shooting himself on purpose. Both Zaladonis (who appeared with Kerry at his arrival celebration for the Democratic National Convention) and Runyon have defended Kerry and debunked that specific claim.
The day after Matthews challenged her false accusations, Malkin wrote about her Hardball interview on her personal website. She called Matthews a “caveman” and “a foaming jerk”; decried his “Neanderthal chauvinism” and his MSNBC program’s “basement ratings”; and listed the phone numbers for Matthews and his producer.
Later that day, as a guest on the August 20 edition of The Laura Ingraham Show, Malkin was comforted by Ingraham, who asked: “How’d you stop from reaching across and grabbing one of the chins of Chris Matthews?”
In previewing the August 20 edition of FOX News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes on his ABC Radio Networks program, Hannity denounced Matthews’s treatment of Malkin: “Michelle Malkin will be on tonight. And I promise you, she will not be treated the same was as she was in an interview last night. Just unbelievable.”
On his August 20 radio show, Limbaugh told Malkin that she “should be proud” of her appearance on Hardball. Limbaugh and Malkin also falsely claimed that MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann called Malkin “an idiot” in the wake of her Hardball interview.

Poor widdle baby! So bruised from her rough treatment at the hands of Chris Matthews. It’s a good thing there are whole networks full of right-wing suck-ups there to help comfort her. ..

Kerry Fires Back

Posted on August 21, 2004

The Kerry campaign has a new ad out responding to the Swift Boat smears that really takes the gloves off.

Watch “America Can Do Better” and see if you don’t agree.

SMACKDOWN!

Posted on August 20, 2004

God DAMN!

On his show “Hardball”, Chris Matthews put the hammer down on Michelle Malkin (who I’ve written about before) when she tried to argue by innuendo that John Kerry shot himself in order to get out of Vietnam.

Did she come out and make that charge? No, of course not. She claimed that “some veterans” had made it, in their book, Unfit for Command.

Fellow MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann comments on this tactic on the Hardball blog:

She raised the story — heretofore consigned largely to Robert Novak and everybody to his right — in that delightful, Teflon way of modern politics: ‘I’m not saying that John Kerry shot himself. But in the Swift Boat Veterans’ book, they ask whether or not his wounds were self-inflicted.’
If Ms. Malkin isn’t seen on television, or moving on her own power, in the next few days, it’s understandable. My colleague Mr. Matthews forced her to hang herself out to dry ten or eleven times (never prouder of you, Chris). He may have directed the momentum, but her wounds were ultimately, uh, self-inflicted.
As Chris rightly pointed out, nobody has produced an iota of evidence that John Kerry’s wounds were anything other than the result of combat. Even in the book, the references to it are speculative and without provenance. Ms. Malkin wouldn’t even go so far as to attribute the suspicion to herself. It was in the book.

Matthews, to his credit, gave Malkin’s innuendo exactly the response it deserved — he pinned it right to the table so everyone could watch it squirm under the hot lights. Oliver Willis has the video so you can see it in all its glory for yourself.

Malkin has a blog too, and she’s predictably crying ambush journalism:

Note that I didn’t bring the subject of shrapnel. (Got that, Keith Olbermann?) Willie Brown raised the issue.
Here is how I responded verbatim:
“Well yeah. Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the shrapnel in his leg? There are legitimate questions about whether or not it was a self-inflicted wound.”
Matthews frantically stuffed words down my mouth when I raised these allegations made in Unfit for Command that Kerry’s wounds might have been self-inflicted. In his ill-informed and ideologically warped mind, this transmogrified into me accusing Kerry of “shooting himself on purpose” to get an award.
I repeated that the allegations involved whether the injuries were “self inflicted wounds.” I DID NOT SAY HE SHOT HIMSELF ON PURPOSE and Chris Matthews knows it.

But Malkin (unsurprisingly) leaves out the key point — that the question Matthews was asking was not whether anti-Kerry wing nuts are making “allegations”, it was whether she agreed with the “allegations”, and she refused to answer it, preferring instead to just keep repeating them. This is a common tactic in modern smear politics — float an allegation, but don’t say that you agree with it, just that lots of other people do and you’re just reporting what they’re saying.

Matthews put his finger right on the problem with that position — if you don’t think there’s something to the allegations, why are you repeating them? And if you do think there’s something to them, why would you have a problem saying so?

Malkin ends her blog post with this:

What I take away from all this is that the Democrat Party waterboys in the media are in full desperation mode. I have now witnessed firsthand and up close (Matthews’ spittle nearly hit me in the face) how the pressure from alternative media sources–the blogosphere, conservative Internet forums, talk radio, Regnery Publishing, FOX News, etc. –is driving these people absolutely batty.
Keep bringing it on.

If “the pressure from alternative media sources” is prompting journalists to finally start standing up and demanding the truth when faced with the kinds of shameful tactics deployed by Malkin, I must say I agree with her: keep bringing it on. Please!

Finally, A REAL Laptop

Posted on August 18, 2004

Well, I’m not wussing around with dainty laptops like the TR3 anymore — I’ve decided to wait until this baby hits the shelves instead. It’s truly a masterpiece of design.

😉

Laptop Showdown Update

Posted on August 17, 2004

Well, my call for feedback on laptop choices has so far resulted in a resounding 5/5 votes to get the Powerbook. Absolutely no love for a machine as sexy as the TR3? I’m stunned.

Some points were raised in the comments I should probably address:

1. Size of display. Agreed that a bigger display is better. However, one thing I have noticed about myself is that I am a lazy son of a bitch — which means that the bigger and heavier a laptop is, the less likely it is that I am gonna carry it with me (and therefore the less useful it is). That’s what appeals to me about “ultraportables” like the TR3 and the Fujitsu Lifebook P series — they are so light that you can carry them almost without noticing.
2. The “everyone’s getting a Powerbook” factor — OK, this one is completely irrational 🙂 It’s just the way I’m wired; I don’t like having the exact same “stuff” as everyone else. To get a sense of what I mean about the Powerbook being the conservative choice, take a look at this photo from Dan Bricklin’s coverage of last year’s BloggerCon — it’s like a fruit orchard. That will make Sandy happy, but for me it’s kind of a turnoff; if I’m gonna drop $2,000 it would be nice to have something that people will look at and go “oooh”, and the Powerbook doesn’t have that anymore. It feels a little like buying a PT Cruiser today, a couple of years after the shine has faded. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not an excellent machine (the Powerbook, not the Cruiser) — I told you this was irrationality talking 🙂
3. Random observation: I’m fascinated how “what processor does it come with?” entered into precisely zero of anyone’s comments, including mine. It’s a striking testament to how awash we are in CPU power that we can buy a system these days essentially without looking at what processor comes packed inside it.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted as I get to the decision point on this — thanks for all the excellent feedback!

New PuTTY Version Fixes Major Security Hole

Posted on August 17, 2004

If you use the excellent Windows SSH client PuTTY, make sure to go update to the latest version, 0.55, as soon as possible:

2004-08-03 SECURITY HOLE, fixed in PuTTY 0.55

PuTTY 0.55, released today, fixes a serious security hole which may allow a server to execute code of its choice on a PuTTY client connecting to it. In SSH2, the attack can be performed before host key verification, meaning that even if you trust the server you think you are connecting to, a different machine could be impersonating it and could launch the attack before you could tell the difference. We recommend everybody upgrade to 0.55 as soon as possible.

Showdown at the Laptop Corral

Posted on August 16, 2004

OK, time for an Audience Participation feature here at Just Well Mixed.

A number of factors — the most critical of which is that it looks like I am going to be doing a lot of traveling this fall — have me thinking that it might be time to break down and buy a laptop. I’ve been skeptical of the value one of these things could add to my life for quite some time, mostly because I have perfectly good PCs at work and at home and don’t really want to be bothered with computers anywhere else; but if I’m going to be spending lots of time on the road, having a decent system handy will become more of a priority. I could just let our IT department issue me a laptop before each trip, but the standard laptops they keep around for such requests are hulking Dell monstrosities with flaky batteries and no wireless support (!!!), which makes toting them around almost more trouble than they’re worth.

So — if I was going to buy a laptop today — here are the two I’d be looking most closely at:

1) Apple Powerbook G4 12″. Do I have to explain this one? Pluses: Apple’s nice industrial design, OS X, good display, lightweight, reasonably priced (under $1,900) if you opt for the CD/DVD-ROM instead of the DVD burner. Minuses: OS X means that I can’t bring over my substantial library of Windows software, 12″ Powerbook doesn’t have a wide-aspect display for optimal DVD playback (gotta go up to the 15″ for that), style points off because every geek has a goddamn Powerbook.

2) Sony VAIO TR3. The big draw here is portability — the TR3 weighs in at only 3.1 pounds, a full pound-and-a-half lighter than the already-svelte Powerbook. Packed in the tiny frame is a 1GHz processor and a nice 10.6″ XBRITE widescreen display. Pluses: light light light, widescreen display standard, runs Windows XP so I can keep my software, looks cool and isn’t in everybody’s bag (yet). Minuses: substantially pokier processor and video than the Powerbook, a little more expensive than the PB (nets out at about $2,100 most places), and it’s from Sony so you know it will come loaded with useless crap.

Executive summary: the Powerbook is a cheaper, more conservative choice (never thought I’d hear myself saying that); the TR3 is an uber-gadget that could either be insanely cool or completely impractical. Between them, it’s a tough call.

So, here’s where the audience participation comes in: what do you think of these two systems? Anyone out there using them with stories (good or bad) to share? Are there systems I should be looking at instead of these? The comment thread awaits your wisdom, people!

Iran Confronting US Forces in Iraq?

Posted on August 13, 2004

From This Is Rumor Control — “Intelligence Officials: Iran Battling U.S. In Iraq“:

Senior intelligence sources in the U.S., as well as officials in the Middle East, claim that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has made a strategic decision to confront American forces in Iraq’s Shi’a heartland. Those senior intelligence sources (a total of five separate individuals who either now serve or have served in key intelligence positions) base their belief on evidence showing that Iran has armed Shi’a groups in southern Iraq with sophisticated weaponry, has provided political and military guidance to Shi’a groups, has made and maintained contacts with Sunni resistance leaders in “the Sunni triangle” in central Iraq, and is pursuing a program of escalating confrontations between Shia militias and American troops. Among the weapons shipped to the Shi’a militants are sophisticated anti-tank rockets and anti-aircraft missiles, according to these sources…

Senior officials of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency would not comment on these reports, but a former senior intelligence officer said that the conclusion was “a no brainer.” As he noted: “If you had U.S. troops on your doorstep and George Bush calling you a part of the axis of evil you would take steps to protect yourself. And it would be better to protect yourself on Iraqi soil than to have to do so on Iranian soil. That is what they are doing. Are we surprised? We shouldn’t be.”

If this is true — if Iran is really bolstering the Iraqi insurgency with arms and “advisors” — it kicks the props out from one of the major arguments as to how Iraq would not turn into a “quagmire” like Vietnam, namely that the Iraqi insurgents had no external power to support them with money and materiel. Ugh.

TimeTrax: Record MP3s from XM Radio

Posted on August 13, 2004

It was only a matter of time: NeroSoft TimeTrax is a new app that lets you rip songs from the XM-PCR XM radio adapter for your PC into MP3 files. $20 to register.

Now, from a technical perspective this is no great feat — as I’ve written before, there are lots of third-party software clients for the XM-PCR, and the only thing stopping any of them from adding recording (since they all have access to the audio bitstream) has been a kind of gentlemen’s agreement between XM and the PCR hacking community that the hackers wouldn’t make life complicated by doing something that forced lawyers to get involved. But the yahoos behind TimeTrax seem not to have gotten the memo on that, so if you have any interest at all in this program, I advise you to get it now before the hordes of attack attorneys swoop in…

Governor McGreevey’s Secret(s)

Posted on August 13, 2004

If you’re like me, you were surprised when you heard that New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey had suddenly resigned from office yesterday, dramatically doing so by coming out to the residents of his state as a gay man and saying that he could no longer hold office because he had broken the covenant of his marriage by cheating on his wife with another man.

I mean, I don’t want to minimize the pain that must have caused Mrs. McGreevey, or the damage it did to their relationship. But honestly, what does it have to do with his ability to be Governor, other than all being a bit embarrassing? Surely he could have continued to do his job after revealing his sexual preference and getting his personal life in order. It didn’t make much sense.

When he made his announcement, he did so with a speech (you can watch it at the MSNBC link above) that was very moving, too. So you left the whole thing thinking, well, maybe the guy means it — maybe he really does honestly think that someone who would cheat on his wife with another man isn’t fit to be the governor of New Jersey.

Now, though, we’re getting more details that, sadly, make a little more sense in today’s cynical world:

The governor’s announcement was reportedly driven by the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit by a former aide, Golan Cipel. Mr. McGreevey, who has two children from his two marriages and whose wife stood next to him during his press conference, acknowledged that he had committed adultery with another man. He did not say that the man in question had worked for his administration.

Gay or straight, that kind of relationship raises troubling questions, apart from the issue of whether it was consensual. Mr. Cipel was originally appointed as the governor’s homeland security adviser, a job for which he had no discernable qualifications. If Mr. McGreevey put someone in that critical post because of a personal relationship, that would be an outrage, regardless of his sexual orientation.

If Jim McGreevey is honestly leaving his office because he feels that he can’t uphold its standards, he has my deepest sympathy. But if he is using his sexuality to try and avoid punishment for abusing that office, he has nothing but my utter contempt.

PageRank Extension

Posted on August 11, 2004

This is neat: the Google PageRank extension adds an indicator to your status bar showing you the Google PageRank of whatever page you happen to be viewing, using the same method the Google Toolbar uses (but without taking up the space of a toolbar, since it fits right in your status bar). Available for Firefox and the Mozilla Suite.

Sleep Well, America!

Posted on August 10, 2004

Intelwire: Nearly 3,000 Pounds Of Ammonium Nitrate Stolen In N.C.

Nearly 3,000 pounds of stolen ammonium nitrate are unaccounted for in North Carolina, even as the U.S. braces itself against a possible al Qaeda truck bomb attack.
Mixed with fuel oil, ammonium nitrate is a favored ingredient used in al Qaeda truck bombs.
Two and a half tons of the volatile fertilizer were stolen from a Royster-Clark fertilizer plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. in early July, according to the Winston-Salem Police Department. Nearly a month after the theft was reported, 2,950 pounds are still unaccounted for, police said Monday. The rest was recovered…
Ramzi Yousef used another commercial fertilizer, urea nitrate, in a truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Some accounts have suggested that he used ammonium nitrate as part of the detonating mechanism.
A New York City terrorist cell linked to both Yousef and al Qaeda planned to use ammonium nitrate to attack NYC landmarks with truck bombs in 1993. That attack was foiled by authorities before it could be completed.
Soon after, Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Alfred E. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City with a bomb employing four to five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate, mixed with a volatile racing fuel. (related story)
The 2002 Bali nightclub bombing is believed to have used ammonium nitrate as its main component. The fertilizer was also used in an attack on the U.S. embassy in Karachi in 2002. al Qaeda is believed to be linked to both those attacks.

Nut Bar Gets GOP Nomination for Congress in TN

Posted on August 6, 2004

Man, you can’t make this stuff up…

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – An unabashed racist will represent the Republican party in the November election for a congressional seat after a write-in candidate failed to derail his effort.

With 86 percent of the primary vote counted Thursday, write-in candidate Dennis Bertrand had just 1,554 votes compared to 7,671, or 83 percent, for James L. Hart, a believer in the discredited, phony science of eugenics.

In November, the GOP candidate will oppose Rep. John Tanner (news, bio, voting record), a Democrat who has represented the northwest Tennessee district for 15 years.

Hart, 60, vows if elected to work toward keeping “less favored races” from reproducing or immigrating to the United States. In campaign literature, Hart contends that “poverty genes” threaten to turn the United States into “one big Detroit.”…

While campaigning, Hart sometimes wears a protective vest and carries a .40-caliber pistol, but he said he has run into no trouble.

“When I knock on a door and say white children deserve the same rights as everybody else, the enthusiastic response is truly amazing,” he said.

I bet it is! If a man with a pistol and flak jacket showed up at my door spouting claptrap about eugenics, I’d probably have an “amazing” reaction myself.

Be sure to check out the candidate’s Web site for all the details of his half-baked platform.

Yawn

Posted on August 5, 2004

Rest easy Maryland, your 911 personnel are ready to protect and serve:

Anne Arundel County police are investigating a 911 operator who allegedly fell asleep while taking an emergency call.
Patricia Berg called 911 in the early morning hours of July 29 when she heard someone trying to break into her Glen Burnie townhouse.
Berg complained to a supervisor that the operator could be heard audibly snoring on the 911 tape, and now police are looking into the incident.

Let’s Play “Who Wants To Get Beaten By Barack Obama?”

Posted on August 4, 2004

Now that their last candidate for the open Senate seat in Illinois, Jack Ryan, has self-destructed, how much trouble are the Illinois GOP having finding a candidate to take on Democratic rising star Barack Obama?

This much.

UPDATE: Yep, it’s true — at least they didn’t pick the one with the sexual harassment charges!

Data That Prompted Terror Alert Pre-dates 9/11

Posted on August 3, 2004

Remember how the Department of Homeland Security put those financial centers on Orange Alert because of intelligence he described as “alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information”?

Funny story: it turns out that the intelligence that he was referring to is actually pretty old — so old that it actually pre-dates the September 11 attacks:

Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.
“There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that is new,” said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. “Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don’t know that.”

So DHS is throwing the alarm lever over information they’ve had in hand for three years? What the hell is that about?

Howard Dean took plenty of flak for suggesting that the motivation for this alert might be more political than security-oriented. He’s looking a lot smarter about this stuff today than the people (myself included) who took DHS seriously are.

“White House West”

Posted on August 2, 2004

Will Ferrell’s new video for liberal advocacy group Americans Coming Together, entitled “A Message From White House West“, is simply hilarious. I’ve seen a lot of these Web movies, and this is one of the very few whose production values and entertainment value strike me as being good enough to have been worth the investment required to make it in the first place.

It remains to be seen how it will do for them as a list-builder, though, considering that the sign-up appeal that’s attached to it is for a pretty ridiculous petition asking the FCC to require proof of factual accuracy before allowing a political commercial to air — a proposal that would be pretty patently unconstitutional. Come on, guys, you can do better than that.

Still, the video is a must-see.

I Guess Everyone Needs A Cause

Posted on August 2, 2004

I defy you to find anything that says “I have too much free time on my hands” more eloquently than this Web site does.

Terror Alert for Financial Buildings in DC, NY, NJ

Posted on August 1, 2004

The Washington Post is reporting today that the Department of Homeland Security has raised the terror alert level to Orange for five financial buildings: the headquarters of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., the New York Stock Exchange and Citicorp buildings in New York City, and Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential-Bache building:

The heightened alert, announced by Ridge publicly at 2 p.m., included a level of detail unprecedented in previous warnings and marks the first time that Homeland Security officials have focused the government’s color-coded threat system on specific geographic areas. The five earlier orange alerts, which indicate a high risk of terrorist attack, have been applied to the nation as a whole, most recently on Dec. 31, 2003.

“The quality of this intelligence, based on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen and it is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information,” Ridge said…

U.S. intelligence officials — whose sources of terrorist information are typically more vague and fragmentary — said during briefings with reporters today that the documents related to the latest al Qaeda plot were among the most specific the government had ever received. But they acknowledged that the plans had been in the works for years and contained no specific date for an attack.

In one example of detailed surveillance cited by a senior administration intelligence official, operatives logged the flow of pedestrians outside one of the targeted buildings at midday in the middle of a week. “Fourteen persons pass by every minute” on one side of the block, they concluded.

Other communications focused on security barricades, traffic patterns, the use of sewers as escape routes and the locations of nearby fire and police stations, schools and libraries, officials said. For one building, the potential attackers discussed how visitors must sign a book telling where they are going but “on Sunday there is no security. This is not the case on Saturday.”

John Robb thinks that, if this threat is real, it is likely to be a feint or a secondary action, rather than a strategic strike by al Qaeda. That may be the case; it’s true that al Qaeda has hit financial targets before (the WTC), but if I was a betting man I would bet they did so more for the Towers’ location and symbolic value than to cause economic disruption, and none of these buildings have the same stature as the WTC (only the NYSE comes close).

That said, it’s encouraging to see concrete steps being taken to head a threat off at the pass, instead of just a blanket “terror alert” that gets everybody antsy with no explanation. Here’s hoping they round the conspirators up quickly.

Ridge Could Step Down After Election

Posted on July 30, 2004

Awww, poor baby:

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge might step down after the November election, telling colleagues that he’s worn out from the huge reorganization of government.
Ridge also says he needs to earn money in the private sector to put his teenage children through college.
The job of Homeland Security Secretary pays $175,700 a year, but government officials at Ridge’s level can easily earn millions of dollars each year in the private sector.

New Get Your War On Today

Posted on July 28, 2004

There’s a new page of comics up at Get Your War On today. Woo hoo!