I see a 'red state', and I want to paint it black . . .
Of course I'm dimly aware that a number of people have voiced what seem to be quite legitimate concerns about the U.S. voting system. I even sent out one or two rants about it in the forum which preceded this blog. Here's a sampling of data:

• This is the first story I saw on the issue.
• Here's the lone academic study I'm aware of, done by some researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
• Here William Rivers Pitt interviews three experts on the topic of touch-screen voting, and does a great job of breaking the issue down into digestible pieces.
• And finally, the link Ken just sent me, which is the first time I've seen the amazing allegation that vote-tampering actually occurred in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election.

I have difficulty knowing how to deal with this information.

First of all, I must reluctantly acknowledge that this information is credible. Perhaps because I work in the computer industry (though my work in computer security has been minimal), I understand that designing and building 100% secure systems is fantastically difficult. It's difficult enough to build a system which actually does what it's supposed to do let alone secure it from evildoers. I would imagine that anyone reading this can tick off dozens of times their computer crashed or locked up on them, or their internet connection was dropped. And I'm sure you've noticed that every software company in the universe offers updates and patches to their software on a regular basis. There are a lot of reasons for this, and a discussion about why software quality is so poor is a completely separate, long, boring discussion, but the fact is that bug-free software is sort of a mythical illusion rather than a reality.

However. I'm willing to accept that it's possible, with lots of independent review and testing (which, apparently, Diebold refuses to submit to), to write a touch-screen voting system which works perfectly. That still leaves the problem of security. And in case anyone thinks that such a thing as 'bulletproof security' exists, consider how much trouble Microsoft has keeping their stuff secure. In fact, just look at all of the security updates Microsoft issues on a near-daily basis. One might argue that the main reason for Microsoft's security problems is that they emphasize new features over all other considerations, and security is mostly an afterthought. Nevertheless, Microsoft is sadly typical of most software companies, and none of the companion links cited above give reason to believe Diebold is any better.

I recall one security expert I used to work with who described optimal computer security using this analogy. Think of a safe. This safe has an optimal security design if I can give you an open copy of the same safe, allow you to take it apart and examine it as much as you like, and you're still unable to break in to the original safe. Similarly, if Diebold's computer security is sufficiently robust, they should be willing and able to undergo scrutiny from independent security experts without an increased risk of vulnerability to their systems. The fact that they refuse to submit to such scrutiny does not give me confidence in their system.

So sadly, this seems to be a real problem. The question is, what to do about it?

It's tempting to throw up one's arms and say "well, the system's broken and no one seems to care, so I guess we just give up." I've been tempted to do that. A less defeatist response is to stick your head in the sand, and pretend that the problem doesn't exist. I hate to admit it, but I think that's where I've been for the past 6 months.

Unfortunately, I believe the bottom line is that a slim majority of folks still support Bush, and wouldn't believe that he or the GOP are capable of such treachery and (this is the really devastating part) wouldn't be all that upset if they were. Although I certainly don't have any hard evidence to back this up, I suspect that most conservatives don't care that the system is broken, because right now, it's broken in favor of their guy. In all fairness, I expect most liberals wouldn't care that much if the broken system favored them (they would care a little more than the conservatives, but not much).

Until the majority of people realize that this problem exists and acknowledge that goes far beyond mere partisanship, things ain't gonna change. On the other hand, if the day ever comes when the majority does acknowledge that this is a serious problem and things don't change, I believe we'll have mayhem.
2:21 PM | Link

 
Because imminent doesn't mean 'imminent'
I wasn't going to write anything today, but then I read The Daily Howler, which pointed me to George Will's Washington Post column, which got me all annoyed about conservative hypocrisy.

Will writes:
      ". . . critics profess themselves shocked and angered because
    (Rumsfeld), Powell and the president supposedly said, repeatedly,
    something that none of them actually ever said. At least, says
    a Rumsfeld aide, an electronic search finds not a single instance
    of them using the argument that Iraq posed an 'imminent' WMD
    threat to the United States."

This is absurd. George Will is a very smart man; he is certainly smart enough to know that it is possible to communicate the idea that there is an 'imminent' threat without actually using the word 'imminent'. In his October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Bush said that Iraq posed a 'grave threat'. He said that America is resolved to 'confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.' He said 'Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.' Considering that he mentions 9/11 five times in the same speech, and al-Qaeda six times, wouldn't a reasonable person conclude that Bush wants us to believe:

1. That there is some link between Iraq and al-Qaeda (another unproven assertion)
2. That Iraq and al-Qaeda can attack the U.S. 'on any given day', i.e. that the threat is 'imminent'?

Why yes. A reasonable person probably would conclude that Bush meant to communicate those ideas. But either the conservative spin doctors like Will aren't reasonable people, or they're counting on the fact that their readers won't go look up Bush's old speeches and invest some careful thought in analyzing them. Actually, those are both pretty safe assumptions.

This is what I mean about the conservative propaganda machine. I entered 'Bush imminent threat' in Google, and in the first three pages I got six different conservative spinmeisters all making the same tired argument: "Well, he never used the word 'imminent'!"

This is why we need to focus on things like Col. Gardiner's psyops report when we discuss Bush administration lies and deceit, and not such straightforward, simple accusations as 'you claimed Iraq posed an imminent threat and you were wrong!'

Anyway, I've taken my own advice (see The New Model Republican Party post from October 15 --- sorry, I don't have my archives linked, don't know how/whether it's possible on Blogger), and sent an email to Will pointing out his intellectual dishonesty. After making a reasoned explanation as to why his words are meaningless, I went on to point out that Bill Clinton denied having 'sexual relations' with Monica Lewinsky, but he never denied 'receiving oral sex' from her, and therefore it must follow that Will agrees with me that Clinton's impeachment was a travesty carried out by partisan zealots.

And as long as I'm on the subject of language, I'd just like to point out that Al Gore never said that he 'invented the internet.' The actual quote is:

      "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative
    in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole
    range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's
    economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our
    educational system."

You see, he was claiming credit for initiating and promoting legislation that allowed the internet to come into existence, not for, say, writing packet-switching protocols and laying fiber-optic cable.

Yes, conservatives are very adept at using Google and Lexis-Nexis when they have their own semantic hairs to split, but when they want to promote a canard that makes the presumptive Democratic nominee for president look like a smug, pompous idiot, they don't bother with the fact-checking too much.

And as long as I'm on the subject of conservative hypocrisy, I really liked Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon.
12:52 PM | Link

 
A Now, a Word About Our Environment . . .
This will be short. It just so happens that there are two screeds about Bush's treatment of the environment today, over at TomPaine.com. The first talks about Bush's dismantling the most important environmental regulation you've never heard of. The second argues that Bush will favor big business over the environment, even when there's a compelling economic argument to do otherwise.

Also, William Rivers Pitt has written another of his outstanding screeds denouncing Bush and his misadministration. Whenever I read one of his articles, I marvel that 50% of the people in this country still give Bush an 'excellent' or 'good' job approval rating. These people must not be reading Pitt (the most likely explanation; his stuff is terribly undercirculated), or they think he's a liar (even though it's fairly easy to verify his claims by spending some quality time with Google), or they read his articles while thinking to themselves: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I can't HEAR you!!!, blah, blah, blah, I'm not LISTENing!!! blah, blah, blah . . . "

Finally, I reread Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article referenced here a few days ago, and decided I like it even better the second time around. If you haven't read it even once, you should.
3:11 PM | Link

 
Support our troops!
The Christian Science Monitor has a wonderful, semi-daily feature called the Daily Update. This link usually has lots of interesting information about the war in Iraq and the War on Terror (note that these are two distinct things), not mention the nearly-forgotten war in Afghanistan (yes, our troops are still fighting and dying there, though not at so alarming a rate as in Iraq).

The problem is that, as the name suggests, the content changes roughly every day or so, and you need to act quickly to see the best links. This is an effort to persist some of them here so folks can browse them at a more leisurely pace.

It should go without saying that I support our troops. In fact, I thought they should have stayed home, safe and sound in the first place. I don't understand how that qualifies as failing to support our troops, or in any way unpatriotic, but since Bush's supporters have made a habit out of questioning the patriotism of those who bring up inconvenient facts, I thought I should make that statement. My main concern for the soldiers in Iraq is that they all come to their families.

It's not clear that the administration shares this concern.

First, let's focus on what our troops are accomplishing in Iraq. The administration insists that things are improving every day, and in some ways I'm sure they're correct. However, given that there are fresh attacks on our troops on an almost daily basis, you would think that a high priority would be given to attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. However, our troops seem to be going about it all wrong. There is a report that troops are mistreating Iraqi prisoners of war, even beating one to death. And though there haven't been any reports recently, there have been at least two incidents of U.S. soliders attacking and killing Iraqi policemen. Human Rights Watch has issued its own report about Iraqi civilian casualties at the hands of U.S. forces.

But maybe these are just unfortunate, extreme cases. In fact, in the police killings (and probably in many of the civilian ones), the problem was that the U.S. troops couldn't quickly and accurately distinguish friend from foe, and after 101 troop deaths and counting since May 1, I'm sure most U.S. forces have a rather itchy trigger finger.

Less tragic, but more difficult to understand, is the recent report that our troops are destroying the crops of farmers who refuse to provide information about guerilla attacks. Again, it's understandable that the U.S. wants to take extreme measures to track down and capture(?) those responsible for the guerilla attacks, but isn't it counterproductive to destroy the livelihoods of Iraqi innocents? I mean, look at the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israelis have responded to Palestinian terror attacks with 'targeted assassinations' and bulldozing the homes of suspected terrorists, the same kind of thing U.S. soldiers are doing in Iraq.

And how effective has it been?

Finally, I want to get back to the question about how well the Bush administration is succeeding in its patriotic (not to mention Constitutional) duty to 'support our troops'. Based on this report by UPI, not very well. According to Stars and Stripes, morale is pretty low, for a plethora of reasons.

Another story about how the Bush administration is ignoring or mistreating our troops shows up every few days. I'll make an effort to point them out when I see them.
12:56 PM | Link

 
Up the stovepipe
The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh posits another explanation for the source of the 'crudely forged documents' which started the whole Plame/Wilson/yellowcake fiasco. In a just-published article, he quotes an unnamed former CIA officer as stating that a bunch of retired CIA operatives made the whole thing up in an attempt to embarrass Cheney.

The administration had set up a system of 'stovepiping' intelligence. 'Stovepiping' is a term used in the intelligence community to describe the process when intelligence supporting a certain policy position is uncritically passed up the chain of command to the highest levels, thus assuring maximum possible support for that policy. The ex-spooks knew the administration was stovepiping to support the invasion of Iraq, and they weren't happy about it, to put it mildly. So a bunch of them got together and created documents which were obvious forgeries, knowing that Cheney would present them as valid and be embarrassed later to have been taken in by such obviously fraudulent data.

I guess things didn't quite work out as the ex-spooks expected. Not only was Cheney not embarrassed, the contents of the documents went largely unchallenged by anyone (other than Jospeh Wilson) until this summer. And thanks to the conservative propaganda machine, the administration is successfully avoiding embarrassment even now.
10:29 PM | Link

 
PsyOps
There's been a fair amount of back-and-forth recently between administration supporters and critics about whether the administration misled, lied to and deceived Congress, the country and the world in the run-up to the war on Iraq. Those accusing the administration of dishonesty are doing a good job of mining Google to come up with damning quotes and facts of one sort and another, while Bush's defenders are increasingly falling back on Clinton-style hair-splitting, which would be funny if the whole thing weren't so serious.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, a guy named Sam Gardiner released a 56-page summary detailing how the U.S. and U.K. governments " . . . conducted a strategic influence campaign that:

• Distorted perceptions of the situtation both before and during the conflict,
• Caused misdirection of portions of the military operation,
• Was irresponsible in parts,
• Might have been illegal in some ways,
• Cost big bucks, and
• Will be even more serious in the future."

It's nice to have most of the major lies and distortions all gathered up in a single document. What makes it compelling is the fact that Sam Gardiner is no simpering liberal Bush-basher. He's a retired Air Force Colonel who has spent his career teaching the fighting men and women of our military about psychological warfare. So, this is a guy who knows what he's talking about.

In the preface, he states that he had been working on this paper with Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, and that he had not intended to write the paper himself. As it happened, Mr. Fineman died of a heart attack while reporting from Baghdad. This resulted in a rather fragmented, hard to read paper, full of spelling and grammar mistakes. This is a shame, because I believe that Col. Gardiner's story is a very important one. Here are just a few of the many points he makes:

• The administration cynically manipulated public opinion before the war by pretending to care about the plight of women in Afghanistan and Iraq. He notes that Laura Bush and Cherie Blair made almost identical remarks about the punishment for a woman who dares to wear nail polish. However, this was just a case of crocodile tears; in the war's aftermath, the situation for women is still dire, and the administration is now silent on the issue.
• Saddam loyalists who were not part of the regular army were originally characterized as "irregulars", then "fidayeen", then "terrorist people dressed in civilian clothes" before the administration settled on "terrorist death squads". The use of the word "terrorist" here no doubt supported the non-existent link between Saddam and 9/11, never mind the fact that it's inaccurate to describe attacks on a foreign military within your borders as a "terrorist" attack.
• Wolfowitz' bogus claim that Iraq was gearing up to stage a cyberattack against the U.S. There were no major attempts to penetrate any U.S. systems during the war.
• False reports that Saddam's thugs hanged a woman for waving to coalition troops.
• Numerous falsehoods/inconsistencies surrounding the Jessica Lynch story.
• The administration made numerous absolute statements that Iraq was executing prisoners of war. To date, there is still no solid evidence to support this.

There were two bits that I found especially interesting. The first was in the context of the Jessica Lynch story. U.S. media received a lot of information about PFC Lynch which was deemed classified. Col. Gardiner points out "This was a major pattern from the beginning of the marketing campaign throughout the war. It was okay to release classified information if it supported the message." It occurs to me that perhaps this systematic use of classified information to support the cause is what led the unknown administration official to think it was acceptable to blow Valerie Plame's cover.

The other interesting bit also ties in to the Plame/Wilson/yellowcake story. Gardiner refers to this story and mentions the fact (which has been lost in recent media coverage) that the initial allegations of Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger were made in documents which ultimately proved to be crude forgeries. To date, I have never heard any speculation as to who might have done the forging, or their motive for doing so. Gardiner suggests three possibilities for the source: the Department of Defense could have manufactured the documents as part of the campaign to deceive the public; it could have been Israeli intelligence, as Israel stood to benefit greatly from the war, or it could have been the Iraqi National Congress, a group of expatriate Iraqis opposed to Saddam's regime and funded in part by the U.S. government. The INC has an obvious motive for making charges against Saddam, but as time goes one, it becomes more and more clear that information from the INC is not reliable.

All of the various accounts come together to pose a pretty convincing case that the Bush administration is every bit as guilty of lies, deception and distortions as their accusers say they are, and probably more so. The most chilling report is that there's no reason to think they're ever going to stop. They've learned from the mistakes they've made so far, and are honing their skills to manipulate the public even more in the future. Gardiner says:

      "My story would be important if it were the last
    chapter of the book. It's not. There is more to come.
    As the United States struggles with a post-conflict Iraq,
    distortions continue. Probably of more concern, major
    players in the game are working on ways to do it 'better'
    in future conflicts."

You can hear an interview with Col. Gardiner, or watch it, at Democracy Now.
9:30 PM | Link