April 24, 2008
WaPo this AM had what appeared to be a big story:
A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.
The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel's decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.
Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows "remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon," a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video "very, very damning."
Nuclear weapons analysts and U.S. officials predicted that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's planned disclosures to Capitol Hill could complicate U.S. efforts to improve relations with North Korea as a way to stop its nuclear weapons program. They come as factions inside the administration and in Congress have been battling over the merits of a nuclear-related deal with North Korea.
Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha yesterday angrily denounced the U.S. and Israeli assertions. "If they show a video, remember that the U.S. went to the U.N. Security Council and displayed evidence and images about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I hope the American people will not be as gullible this time around," he said.
Video evidence would be huge. If it existed...
A US official, requesting anonymity, told AFP: "There are still photographs of the facility as part of the video, but it's a video presentation, like a Powerpoint presentation. It's not a video of the facility."
Well, OK... But maybe the still photos are so clear and irrefutable that this distinction really doesn't much matter. Or not:
A U.S. official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss classified matters, said that among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility.
I'm actually at a loss for words on this one. Just... wow.
UPDATE: Or.. FT via TPM:
One photograph shows a North Korean nuclear scientist named Chon Chibu standing beside a person believed to be his Syrian counterpart. Mr Chon has worked at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which produced the material for the bomb North Korea tested in 2006, and has dealt with US officials in the past. The US official said the date of the meeting was unclear, but said the vintage of a car that appears in the background suggests it was sometime after 2005.
Shouldn't these people a) get their stories straight before talking to the media, and b) do so on the record so that we might actually trust what they say?
April 17, 2008
This probably won't be particularly surprising to anyone, but its still pretty funny. Rather than rely on historians to create the exhibits in the Bush Presidential Library, the President has decided to put everything in the hands of the marketing people. Their mission? To "promote the vision of the president" and "celebrate" his presidency.
I know I'm supposed to be all outraged about this, but as I've said before, I actually think this is fitting. LBJ tried the same thing, and after he died his library was changed to better reflect reality. But in this case, I actually hope they leave part of it as is as a monument to the way this administration behaved. Rather than revise it, I would annotate it, displaying the truth along side the marketers fiction. If nothing else, it would serve as a powerful incentive to future presidents not to try the same thing.
April 13, 2008
We are ruled by idiots. I mean, if you are the President's National Security Adviser, shouldn't you know the difference between Tibet and Nepal? And shouldn't it take more than listening to Jimmy Carter to confuse the two?
April 12, 2008
Ezra is right: this really is beginning to look like a global crisis.
As if there weren't already enough other things to be worried about...
April 11, 2008
This is some serious inside the blogosphere nonsense, but for those of you obsessed enough to get the joke, its really just too good not to pass along.
Once upon a time, conservative talking head Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called "Liberal Fascism." The thesis of the book went something like this: Hitler was a vegetarian, and so are liberals! Even before the book hit the streets, Jonah was already being fairly widely mocked. That led to this response over at NRO, which included the following lines:
My book isn't like Dinesh's latest book. It isn't like any Ann Coulter book. It isn't what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is. Or what Frank Rich imagines it is. It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
That last sentence led to even more widespread mocking, but eventually it seemed to die down.
Until tonight. Tonight I got my copy of Matt Yglesias' new book, Heads in the Sand, from Amazon. After prying it from the box, I flipped it over to read the blurbs, and look what I discovered:
"A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." --Ezra Klein, staff writer at The American Prospect
I don't know which I'm more impressed with: that Ezra thought to do this, that Matt had the balls to let him, or that they managed to get it all past the publisher. I mean.... wow.
Anyway, I'll read the book this weekend and get back to you with a review some time next week.
April 9, 2008
That is all.
UPDATE: No sooner had I written that then I saw this.... and this is really funny. I've got to give Mayor Newsom props for this. Protests in SF are usually nothing more than a mass exercise in self-importance, so the fact that they didn't get a chance to wave their flags and dance with puppets for one another is likely to make their heads explode.
I mean, look at this nonsense:
"Gavin Newsom runs San Francisco the way the premier of China runs his country - secrecy, lies, misinformation, lack of transparency and manipulating the populace," (Board of Supervisors President Aaron) Peskin said. "He misled supporters and opponents of the run. People brought their families and their children, and (mayoral officials) hatched a cynical plan to please the Bush State Department and the Chinese government because of the incredible influence of money.
"He did it so China can report they had a great torch run," Peskin said. "It's the worst kind of government - government by deceit and misinformation."
If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is surely that living in SF under Mayor Newsom's rule is exactly like living in China under Communist Party rule. I mean, really, the parallels between the plights of people in Tibet and in San Francisco are so similar that I do not know how I did not see it before.
Amazing. These people are here to protest the treatment of the people of Tibet, and in doing so, they demonstrated that they have absolutely no understanding whatsoever of what the people in Tibet are actually living though. To equate what happened here to what goes on in China is so astonishingly ignorant and, yes, self-important, that it makes my brain hurt.
And yet I must press on to the next wonderful example:
Police said no arrests had occurred and that clashes related to the protests had been minor. But the situation was tense for hours before the run, and at least one person was detained in front of the ballpark this morning. A few hours later, a confrontation between the two sides escalated to a physical violence, when a San Francisco man named Kevin Johnson, 48, walked into a crowd of torch supporters and began yelling, "Communists!"
The crowd encircled Johnson and the confrontation escalated when Johnson pulled a Chinese flag off a man's backpack. Then, someone grabbed Johnson's throat and another person punched him in the face before police intervened and walked him to safety.
And yes, if there is one thing someone in SF should not be... if there is one thing that you could yell at a San Franciscan that is sure to get under their skin... it is "communist." If ever there was a community in which the word "communist" was a slur, it is surely San Francisco. What a genius this man is! How cutting and insightful are his words! He called a San Franciscan a communist. The horror!
And doesn't this anecdote do such a wonderful job of demonstrating the truth of Sup. Peskin's claims above? I mean, it really is just like living in Communist China! A protestor came out to an event, heckled the official delegation, got in a fist fight, and was then led to safety by the police. So authoritarian! So manipulative! It was as if Lhasa had been recreated at McCovey Cove. Only this time with hot dogs and baseball. Or something.
But we must continue on with this, because there is another Super who must be heard.
San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly was one of the protesters in the street, holding a 40-foot sign that read, "San Francisco says: No torch in Tibet." Daly wrote legislation passed last week by the Board of Supervisors that was critical of the Chinese government and called on local officials to receive the torch with "alarm and protest."
The group headed back toward the Ferry Building around 1 p.m., after nine protesters lay down in front of what they thought was a bus carrying the torch at Bryant Street and blocked its passage. While supporters chanted slogans, police removed them.
Yes, Sup. Daly. SF says "no torch in Tibet!" Not "no human rights abuse in Tibet." No, not that. "No torch." If only the torch could be stopped, all would be right in the world!
And then.... They chanted slogans and lay down in front of a bus! All nine of them! My goodness! I'm sure the people of Tibet will be moved to know that San Franciscans did something that will so dramatically aid their cause. I mean, wow. A bus was blocked for a few moments that might have but did not actually contain a torch that will eventually be carried into a stadium in China. With dancing! And puppets! If only the world had more heroes like these all of our problems would be solved.
Sometimes I am sooooo glad I no longer live in San Francisco.
April 5, 2008
Via Patrick over at Andrew's place, a great one from George F. Kennan's 1954 book The Illusion of Security:
There is something about this quest for absolute security that is self-defeating. It is an exercise which, like every form of perfectionism, undermines and destroys its own basic purpose. The French have their wonderful proverb: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien--the absolute best is the enemy of the good. Nothing truer has ever been said . A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.
This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible--an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief-making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand the what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions.
Here we are nearly 45 years later, and we're still making the same mistakes and having the same conversation. Clearly we already know enough to know better. Or at least some of us do. The question, I suppose, is how do we translate this long-held knowledge into action? How do we take what we have so clearly already learned and make it our political reality? I do not accept that we are destined to continue to make the same mistakes over and over again until we collapse. There must be another way. There must.
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