The latest reports of real live pyracy in 2006, from the International Chamber of Commerce's Commercial Crime Services:

Recently reported incidents

30.04.2006 at 1150 UTC in position 03:04.3S - 107:17.2E, Gelasa straits,  Indonesia. Three pirates armed with long knives in a craft threw grapnel hooks at stern of a tanker underway and tried to board. Alert crew mustered and pirates aborted boarding. Description of craft, motorised banka, 5m long, colour - green/brown.

29.04.2006 at 2245 LT in position: 02:55S - 107:18E, Gelasa straits, Indonesia. Six pirates armed with long knives in a speedboat boarded a bulk carrier underway. They took hostage master, c/e and two other engineers. They stole equipment and personal belongings of crew and escaped.

28.04.2006 at 0210 UTC in position: 06:01.3N - 003:17.4E, Lagos Roads, Nigeria. Three robbers in an eight metre boat attempted to board a tanker. Alert crew prevented boarding.

And here's the maps of pirate attacks this year:





Keep your cutlass sharp and your powder dry - you never know when you'll be dodging cannon balls (and repelling boarders).

The New York Times says:

Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

Yes, he can.

The President is the final classification authority. If he says something is declassified, it is declassified. That's the law.

Classified information is not holy writ. It has no supernatural properties that make it above the authority of the executive branch that classified it. It's just information that someone with the appropriate legal authority says should be protected from public disclosure.

There are other original classification authorities, but not a lot of them. The Secretary of Defense is an original classification authority for DOD information, and the Director of Central Intelligence is an original classification authority for most intelligence information. Combatant commanders (CENTCOM, STRATCOM, etc.) are original classification authorities for sensitive information originating from their staffs.

But the President is the final authority about what is classified or not. If he says something is not classified, it isn't, period.

The above quote is from a New York Times editorial, attempting to impugn the President for releasing a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. (Registration/pestering required to actually read the article.)

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and a host of Washington pundits are attempting to rationalize and justify the leak of the "CIA prison story". They are attempting to equate the leaking of the prison story by a CIA official who didn't have the authority to release the information with the President authorizing the release of an Intelligence Estimate.

The blog-o-sphere has been on fire with respect to this story.

From "The Adventures of Chester":

All of this is hair-raising because it really makes one wonder: what the heck are the Chinese, Russians, Saudis, etc able to pull off if our own spooks are up to pranks like this? Who's minding the store while these yahoos have a go at some domestic political intrigue of their own? Seriously, what kind of people get their jollies from trying to maneuver their way into the position of First Assistant Deputy Assistant to the Undersecretary of Whatever, instead of trading espionage blows with the Russkies and ChiComs? If it seems bewildering to you too, I'm at a loss to explain it -- except to say that many years ago, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the CIA's clandestine service, writing under his pseudonym, Edward Shirley, published an article in The Atlantic about his own experiences at Langley, which asked the question, "Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?" The answer is either "no", or that they were playing a quite different game altogether.

In From the Cold comments:

Within a few weeks, fired CIA officer Mary McCarthy will take her place in the pantheon of liberal heroes. Democratic politicians, left-leaning pundits and analysts in the drive-by media will hail her "courage" in exposing secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe, and providing that information to the Washington Post. There will almost certainly be a book and movie deal; I'm sure Joe Wilson's literary agent will be in touch, if he hasn't called already. However, timing for those media events will probably depend on whether Ms. McCarthy spends any time in jail for her "disclosures."

Captain's Quarters wonders if it wasn't a set-up to catch leakers:

A leak, by its nature, involves releasing actual classified or sensitive information, so any leaker can be said to have "told the truth" as part of the process. In this case, however, we still have no independent verification that McCarthy's story of a chain of torture chambers across Europe was anything other than either McCarthy's exaggeration of transit stops for captured terrorists or a mole hunt. Two European investigations conducted after the leak (and the attendant diplomatic damage) have found exactly nothing.

and

It seems to me that the series of detention centers described by Dana Priest in the article based on the McCarthy leaks would have included a not-insignificant number of support personnel, assisting in the clandestine movement of agents and detainees through secret facilities in Europe and elsewhere. The logistics of such a program would be overwhelming. Either a clandestine team would have to be created for the effort, or the resources of CIA field offices throughout Europe would have to be exploited to ensure the program remained effective and secret. The only scenario I can see where the information on the program could be contained within just a few individuals would be that the program never really existed at all -- and that's why the investigation centered so quickly on McCarthy and a few others.

I don't know if that's true. The damage from people thinking there is such a program certainly outweighs the benefit of catching people who leak to the press.

But there is no question that there have been aggressive efforts to catch leakers lately, in large part because of the severe damage the leaks have done to the war on terrorism.

I don't mean "to the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism". The leaks have really hurt the troops at the lower levels, and there really wasn't a any excuse for the leaking. In some cases it isn't even political - just self aggrandizement: "Look at me - I'm so important and special that I have this special information".  In other cases, it is lower level people trying to make their own policy, which appears to have been the case with Mary McCarthy.

There are press reports yesterday (and already a Wiki article) about a senior CIA official who was fired Friday, and escorted from the building, for leaking the "secret CIA prisons" story to Dana Priest at the Washington Post.

I have written previously about the strange case of Sandy Berger's removal of the documents (in his socks and his underwear, according to various sources), and how those documents may have been related to the investigations then being conducted by the 9/11 Commission.

We still don't know what was in those documents removed by Sandy Berger, or how their removal affected the investigation into the government's response to al Qaeda terrorism during the Clinton Administration.It is also unclear or uncertain why Mary McCarthy chose to tell Dana Priest about the CIA's secret prison system (if, in fact, that's what happened).
The obvious implication is that McCarthy had political or philosophical differences with how al Qaeda detainees were being handled, and felt the only way to air her concerns was via illegally leaking classified information to the Washington Post.

This goes on all the time in Washington, including at the CIA, but the firing of a senior official for leaking is unprecedented as far as I know. The closest analogy I can think of is the firing and prosecution of Samuel Loring Morison, who was a fairly low level employee at the Office of Naval Intelligence, for releasing satellite imagery to Jane's Defense Weekly magazine.
Morison was convicted and jailed, although - very interestingly - he was pardoned by Bill Clinton in the last hours of his Presidency, on 20 January 2001. (Along with an amazing rogue's gallery of strange characters, including his brother, a whole bunch of drug traffickers, and former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch.) Morison's motivation appears similar to McCarthy's - he said he wanted to reveal the threat posed by the Soviet Navy so that the American people would support increases to the Defense Budget during the Reagan Administration.

The case of John Deutch is also similar. Deutch was accused of mishandling classified information, specifically taking classified materials home and storing them on a personal computer connected to the internet. Although the case against Deutch was overwhelming and the law was clear - in fact many other people, notably Wen Ho Lee, had been prosecuted for doing the same thing - Attorney Janet Reno declined to prosecute Deutch and he was subsequently given a consulting job, with security clearance, at CIA, after leaving the post of DCI in disgrace. Bill Clinton pardoned him on 20 January 2001 to prevent the incoming Bush administration from prosecuting him, which it almost certainly would have done.

McCarthy's firing reveals the ongoing political friction between many at senior CIA career officials  and the Bush administration. This friction appears to be a combination of political differences, e.g. opposition to administration policies, and bureaucratic conflict, over the organization, control, and operation of the intelligence community. It will be very interesting to see if she is prosecuted, as was Samuel Loring Morison and Wen Ho Lee - low level people who mishandled classified information - or if she is quietly brought back into CIA in a different position, as was former DCI John Deutch. I'm guessing she won't be prosecuted.
The whole affair reveals continuing disarray and conflict within the intelligence community, however, and highlights the fact that we still don't know the truth about the intelligence community's advanced information about 9/11 or how the catastrophic attack could have been prevented.

This might suggest we are still at grave risk of another similar attack.

 Update: I started this post yesterday (Saturday) when the news was very fresh. In the last 24 hours a lot more information has come out. Wretchard at Belmont Club has a lot of hot stuff, including how McCarthy's career took off during the Clinton administration despite pretty unremarkable credentials, and how she was about to retire from CIA anyway.

The New York Times has already published a defense of McCarthy that relies heavily on the testimonials of Clinton-era officials, including Steve Simon and Randy Beers. That article, interestingly, says McCarthy opposed the ill-conceived cruise missile strike on the al Shifa plant in Sudan, was opposed to covert again against terrorism in general, and was viewed with suspicion as a Clinton-era appointee by the new Bush administration, resulting in her eventual removal from the position of Senior Director of Intelligence Programs at the NSC.

The balance of information coming out suggests that McCarthy had both political and personal issues with the current administration, and may have made a "calculated move" in leaking the story of the secret prisons to the Washington Post. Some sources, including a former CIA  Deputy Director, say McCarthy may have been a "scapegoat" for others in the CIA, because she was near retirement anyway, and was already viewed with suspicion by the Bush White House.

Knowing how these things work, I would believe she was not the only leaker of classified information to Dana Priest for the secret prisons story. Clearly something extraordinary went on, however, leading to the unprecedented step of firing a career CIA official for leaking. 

Recently I wrote that Abu Musab al Zarqawi had probably shot himself in the foot by blowing up the Samarra shine.

Apparently, he is now reaping the result of that and other counterproductive acts. Various sources report he has been fired as leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

I imagine the al Qaeda leadership is none too happy with the Z-man for making al Qaeda into a dirty word - among radical, anti-coalition, insurgent Iraqi Sunnis. Killing all those Shi'a didn't buy him very much either. He may have gotten his bosses in al Qaeda in some pretty hot water with the Iranians, which can't be very helpful.

While thinking of our future as dhimmis, I was reminded of Darren Daulton, a former catcher for the Phillies who believes the world will end on December 21st, 2012.

He apparently believes this because, according to popular lore (popular with the New Age set, anyway), the Mayan calendar ends on that date.

Actually, the Mayan calendar doesn't end in December 2012, but one of its major cycles does.

The significance of this cycle is unknown, but there are various other folks, many of whom look like they may have been influenced by some of this Mayan New Age hoo-ahh, who predict Very Bad Things for 2012. One of these predictions involves the "Olduvai Cliff", which is related to the supply of oil. The Olduvai Cliff theory simply says civilization will enter steep decline because we don't have enough oil  to keep the lights on, starting in 2012.

Farther out on the wacko scale is Terence McKenna's Novelty Theory, which says time will just end in 2012, according to some graphs of unquantified (and in fact unspecified) data . McKenna did LOTS of acid and mushrooms, and was known to be into the whole "Mayan New Age" schtick.

But all this "End of the World" stuff got me thinking about previous civilizations which have ended.

One of the most interesting ones is Mohenjo-Daro.

Mohenjo-Daro is a 5000-year-old (at least) city in Pakistan that represents the high point of the long-lost Indus Valley civilization. It was a "planned community", with sophisticated water and sewer systems, complex government, and advanced engineering. Computer simulations of what Mohenjo-Daro would have looked like in 3300 BC bear very striking resemblance to 21st century Cairo or Quetta.

Mohenjo-Daro provokes some very thorny questions. From a discussion forum on Vedic culture:

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known,
not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point
in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers
do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a
complex urban environment. We need to address the following question
to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban
development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo
Daro?
2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when
99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that
the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up
and labelling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and
are being overly indulgent with our "soft sciences" regarding their
cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have
very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers
from behind glass towers?

We don't know much of anything about the Indus Valley civilization: where it came from, how it emerged, with technology not much different from our present era, from the so-called "stone age" virtually overnight, or why it collapsed. We don't even know what language they spoke or how to decipher their writing.

One intriguing theory however, says that the writing of the Indus Valley civilization looks an awful lot like the also-undeciphered Rongorongo script from Easter Island.

Rongorongo is a mysterious series of symbols found on much-more contemporary wooden tablets that, like the Indus Valley script, has not been deciphered, with the exception of one tablet shown to be a lunar calendar.

Comparison of Rongorongo symbols to Indus Valley script seems pretty inconclusive to me. Some symbols look somewhat similar, but neither form of writing can be read, and in the case of the Indus Valley script, we have no idea what language was spoken by the people who created it.

But readers of this blog may recall that I am sceptical about the mainstream history of ancient human civilizations. Is it possible that there was a lot more going on in human civilization 5000 years ago than we have discovered via archeology? Like some kind of global seafaring culture that has been lost? I'm convinced it is at least possible.

And something brought these ancient civilizations to an end, and it was hundreds or thousands of years before successor civilizations sprung up in their place.

Could that happen to us? Will it happen to us? I hope we don't find out in 2012.

Via Eric Raymond, a very interesting short story from Dan Simmons.

It's about "Category Error". You may or may not already be familiar with the term "Category Error". I wasn't, but I understood before Simmons defined it, because I deal with it all day every day.

In case you aren't familar, and don't follow the link to read Simmons' story, "category error" is when you so misdefine a problem that solution is impossible. Sort of like being infected with  typhoid and misdiagnosing it as "evil spirits".

I see it all the time. People want to define a problem in terms that make them comfortable.  If the problem doesn't actually fit those terms, however, all strategies to address the problem will be ineffectual. Two hundred years ago, nobody understood germs, but they understood evil spirits. Unfortunately, the germs were there and the evil spirits, whether they existed or not, were not the problem.

The punchline of Simmons' story is that a future of dhimmitude awaits us, because we're making a category error by regarding "terrorism" as the problem, when the real problem is impending Islamic conquest of western civilization.

Much of this is pure demographics. Muslims may be a majority in France in less than 25 years, with many other European countries close behind.

Some of it is a function of the current conflict or clash of civilizations. Islam - according to mainstream theology - divides the world into the dar al islam ("House of Peace" - the Islamic world) and the dar al harb ("House of War", or the rest of the world), and mainstream Islamic theology mandates the conquest of the dar al harb to bring it into the dar al islam. The difference between a militant Islamist and a moderate Muslim is that the former is physically engaged in that conquest, and the latter  merely supports it.

Political correctness, which Eric Raymond has previously pointed out originated as a communist plot to subvert the western democracies, now serves as one of Islam's most potent weapons. (Bill Lind wrote about the same thing.) Dhimmitude is ingrained in western political correctness philosophy, teaching, education, regulation, and law. We won't overcome that.

If I started my own religion, and called it, perhaps, the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster (oops, that's already taken), and declared that women were second class citizens who could be subjugated, discriminated against, humiliated, enslaved, and even killed at the whim of men, and anyone who didn't believe in my religion was subhuman and everything they owned was forfeit,  I would be jailed, at the very least.

Yet we in the west are told that those exact same practices are perfectly OK for Muslims, and we are required to support atrocities which are against everything our civilization is based on, just because those atrocities are a part of Islam.

Consequently, we are losing the "Global War on Terrorism", just the same as we would have lost World War II had we declared it to be the "Global War on Aviation".

Yet another smoking gun, in the sense that a D-30 artillery piece with flames shooting out of the barrel is a "smoking gun".

Unfortunately, this latest document is 47 megs of PDF in Arabic.

What it says is that the Iraqi Army, specifically the Iraqi Air Force, recruited terrorists for suicide missions in March 2001 - from within its own ranks.

Here is a translation, courtesy of Captain's Quarters:

In the Name of God the Merciful The Compassionate

Top Secret

The Command of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

No 3/6/104

Date 11 March 2001

To all the Units

Subject: Volunteer for Suicide Mission

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Air Brigadier General

Abdel Magid Hammot Ali

Commander of Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Force Base

Air Colonel

Mohamad Majed Mohamadi.

Captain's Quarters makes much out of the fact that it was the Air Force that was recruiting suicide operatives, suggesting it might have been related to the "Phase II" operation planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to follow 9/11.

This is only one of many interesting documents found on the Foreigh Military Studies Office web site at West Point. Many of these documents are not even translated yet, and many are unreasonably gigantic PDF files (I don't know what's up with that).

But many of the documents also appear to refer to Iraqi WMD programs. You know, the WMD programs that the MSM has decided didn't exist? More smoking guns anyone? One of the documents is entitled IRAQI BIOLOGY COMMAND - MEETINGS WITH UN; INFORMATION ON EXPERIMENTS, BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROGRAM; AND STORAGE LOCATIONS

What I would like to find in the vast library of as-of-yet-untranslated documents is information about the possibility that some of Iraq's anthrax may have made its way to al Qaeda. I don't know for sure, but still believe that will eventually come out..

There are a lot of documents available, and many are huge, and only very partially translated. There is no telling what we might learn once they have all been studied and published, but I have noticed all the people who were saying "There is no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever." have now shut up.

 

It would seem that the "rest of the story" about Able Danger is starting to come out.

"The rest of the story" is the connection between the 9/11 plot and "Operation Bojinka", which was an initiative to hijack several aircraft over the Pacific in 1995, and the connections between Ramzi Yousef and one of the  9/11 Commission Staffers.

"Bojinka" was the brainchild of master terrorist (and nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) Ramzi Yousef. I have written about Yousef before, discussing the various conspiracy theories about Yousef's connections to both Iraq and the Oklahoma City bombing. Yousef was captured in Pakistan after fleeing the Philippines in 1995 where  he had a little accident while making bombs in a Manila apartment. He was subsequently extradited to the US and incarcerated in New York.

I knew, but hadn't blogged, about the odd story of Ramzi Yousef's relationship there with a jailed New York mobster named Gregory Scarpa, Jr. 

Scarpa, while incarcerated in the same facility, made friends with Yousef and received all sorts of extraordinary information from him - information which he passed to the FBI in an effort to reduce his own sentence. Among the tidbits in Scarpa's account was a claim by Yousef that al Qaeda was responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing (the US gov't credits "Saudi Hizballah with support from Iran") and a claim that Yousef had warned various people to "stay away from TWA aircraft" on July 18, 1996. (The crash of TWA 800, which was officially ruled an accident, was on July 17, 1996.

Many of the original FBI reports of Scarpa's relationship have been leaked and are available on the internet here. (Unless they are forgeries, but I've never heard of the FBI denying them.) As I say, I knew about them and had always wondered why the story of Ramzi Yousef's running terrorist operations from jail with the assistance of the Mafia hadn't gotten more attention.

Well it now we know the rest of the story.

It turns out that the prosecutor of Ramzi Yousef - and I didn't know this before today - was none other than Dieter Snell (thanks to the Able Danger Blog). Dieter Snell, in case you don't remember, was the 9/11 Commission Staffer who squelched all references to Able Danger in the Commission's report.

He would have known about Yousef's various communications with Gregory Scarpa, Jr., and how those some of those communications represented eerie foreshadowing of the 9/11 plot, as well as a much more robust and formidable al Qaeda presence in the US prior to 9/11 than the Commission's report suggests.

In light of this revelation that he prosecuted Ramzi Yousef, his work on the Commission looks a whole lot more suspicious.

So what was he up to?

Well only just yesterday a former FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio was indicted in New York for corruption and racketeering, specifically for conspiring with notorious mob boss Gregory Scarpa, Sr. to murder several rival mafiosi.  And who was the source of this information linking FBI Agent DeVecchio to Scarpa, Sr.? None other than Gregory Scarpa, Jr.

According to journalist Peter Lance, Dieter Snell needed to impugn the credibility of Gregory Scarpa, Jr. to protect numerous other cases he prosecuted where FBI Agent DeVecchio was a key witness. (This was apparently done.) He couldn't very well use information obtained from Scarpa, Jr. about terrorists while he was claiming that Scarpa, Jr. was lying about his father's relationship with DeVecchio.

This whole scenario is complicated and seemingly kind of improbable to me, but what isn't really in dispute is that Snell knew what Scarpa, Jr. had reported about Yousef's claims and activities related to ongoing al Qaeda plots in the United States. And Snell was a principal author of the 9/11 Commission Report - a report which gives a completely different "timeline" from the one that emerges from Scarpa's reports.

So then Able Danger comes along. The Able Danger team had information (about the presence of al Qaeda terrorists in the United States) which contradicted the timeline in the 9/11 Commission's narrative, but fit in a lot better with Ramzi Yousef's story.

And Dieter Snell was the guy who made sure Able Danger was left out of the Commission's report.

As I say, this seems all very improbable. But if it is even partially true, then the 9/11 Commission Report isn't worth the paper it is printed on and we need a Commission to investigate the Commission, and try to figure out what REALLY happened.

From Cronaca:

Scientists say fossilised skull from Ethiopia could be missing link

Apparently a new skull has been found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, long believed to be the cradle of modern humanity, that may represent an evolutionary bridge between the modern Homo Sapiens and the much older Homo Erectus.

This is a pretty big story because of the ongoing question about the origin of humanity. The conventional wisdom holds that Homo Sapiens evolved in that part of Africa 100,000-200,000 years ago, and spread out to the rest of the world. Other recent evidence, however, has suggested that the human family tree is much older, larger, bushier, and more complex than previously believed.

This new find would seem to promote the traditional out-of-Africa theory, as well as the "young humans" hypothesis.

This subject interests me because of my fascination with cryptohistory - things that happened in our past that have been lost, hidden, or forgotten. If the history of humanity is shorter and simpler, there is logically less cryptohistory to be discovered.

There is a pretty interesting article at World Magazine online which gives a few more tidbits from the moderately large data dump from CENTCOM this week.

Included in this article is a discussion of Zarqawi operating in Iraq with the tacit approval of Saddam before the invasion, the dispatch of 3000 Fedayeen Saddam fighters to Afghanistan to fight the coalition there, more on concealment of WMD programs, and the capture by the Kurds of an al Qaeda unit entering Iraq from Iran in 2002.

Additionally, Steven F. Hayes at the Weekly Standard has a new data-dump as well. Steve Hayes has been one of the leading investigators in the world on this subject, and while he has been subjected to a lot of ridicule by the MSM for his hard-hitting reporting, nothing he's ever published has been disproved.

Steve Hayes' new article discusses further the terrorist training camps originally described by Iraqi defector Saba Khodada (and subsequently aggressively covered up by the mainstream media). It relates how the Marines found lists of Palestinian terrorists trained at Salman Pak, and recalls how that information was totally buried by the media at the time, and includes the report from the  Iraqi al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo who says he participated in Iraq-al Qaeda joint operations (which isn't new). The article also suggests that the intelligence community underestimated and misread the involvement of the Iraqi intelligence service in supporting and facilitating international terrorism, to which most serious students of the issue would say "no duh". Apparently there is also a recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that says the CIA seriously missed the boat on detecting the role of Iraq in sponsoring terrorism and training terrorists.

It's almost getting boring to relate further evidence of the Iraq-al Qaeda connections, but I do think we are getting to the point where the relationship can no longer be disputed, even by the most sceptical or biased of observers.

As I think I have written before, I defy anyone anywhere out there to refute the total body of evidence of the relationship. To date I haven't seen anyone make even a halfhearted attempt. I have only seen categorical assertions with no evidence, over and over again, from the mainstream media and other anti-administration political elements.

The point, in case anyone has missed it, is not that Iraq and al Qaeda had an operational relationship that made the removal of Saddam Hussein a logical and necessary strategy of the global war on terrorism, but that the mainstream media has deliberately deceived the American people about that fact, apparently because of crass partisan politics.

Remember that they only got it wrong after 9/11.

In the news today:

ABC News says Saddam OK'd bin Laden contact

Story out today says that recently released documents captured in Iraq confirm 1995 meeting between Osama and Iraqi Intelligence, and refers to a later written agreement between Osama and Saddam. (This is in addition to a suspected 1998 meeting about which I previously wrote.)

I think somewhere in the past I estimated that eventually the weight of evidence confirming the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship would become irresistable, and the revisionists in the MSM would no longer be able to cover it up. This appears to be happening.

US Navy Engages Pirates off African Coast

This makes US Navy 2, Pirates 0, I think.

Check out photos here.

From Bill Lind's blog:

One of the reasons none of America’s armed services has yet transitioned from the Second to the Third Generation is the vast number and size of their headquarters. All those headquarters’ officers are continually looking for something to do, and for some scrap of information that will give them 30 seconds of face time in the endless PowerPoint briefings that are American headquarters’ main business. The result is that they impose endless demands on the time and energy of subordinate units. One Army battalion last year told me they had to submit 64 reports to their division every day.

As he often is, Bill is correct. I am certain that no one who doesn't study the military intensely, or serve in it, can comprehend how many gigantic staffs are almost completely enslaved by Power Point.

I believe the Army alone has the equivalent of several brigades worth of people whose only jobs are producing briefings. The other services are the same. Perhaps they might be less desperate for people to send to Iraq if they could get some of them out of making slides for yet another meaningless briefing.

The problem is a failure of leadership. In order to rise to a level high enough to make reforms in the military, you have to prove you are willing to play the game and preserve the dysfunctional status quo. At the beginning of World War II, there was a major purge of leaders who didn't know what they were doing. I don't think its possible for something like that to happen again, so there is ultimately no solution.

Also from Bill (who's kind of on a roll) is an even more salient comment about political correctness:

To understand the Left’s insistence on leaving the drawbridge down, one has to know what “Political Correctness” and “multi-culturalism” really are. They are code words for the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, the Marxist think tank that, beginning around 1930, undertook the intellectually difficult task of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms (it had to break with both Moscow and Marx on some important points to do it.) Cultural Marxism’s purpose is the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion. Any ally helpful in reaching those goals is to be welcomed, including allies who would slit the cultural Marxists’ own throats. So long as the West can be brought down, any price is worth paying.

Exposing the roots of political correctness isn't hard, but not terribly popular, even among some who profess to oppose it. Such is the incredibly pernicious effectiveness of Marxian deceptive thought.

How to Survive the Coming Robot Uprising

Originally I was going to link to this site because it is cool, but after reading it, I'm linking to it because it is not cool. The advice on how to detect and fight robots is terrible. Throw mud in the robot's eyes? That's stupid. How about "engage robot from a safe distance with a rocket propelled grenade or other light anti-armor weapon"?? That's what Buffy the Vampire Slayer did, with great effect, on several occasions.

Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space

Could it be that our universe is only a single cell in a much larger universe, etc etc? That's always been one of my favourite random science fiction theories. Everything I ever needed to know about science (other than robots, of course), I learned from "Men in Black".

Highly Geeky Antique Computer Promotional Photos from James Lileks

Who knew the IBM 370 was so sexy? I remember machines like that, and I very DISTINCTLY don't remember any hot babes in miniskirts hanging around them. I remember no one of the fair sex of any description coming within several hundred meters of the computer science department (prior to the invention of the very sexy, and more importantly, very trendy, Apple Computer).

All this randomly geekly stuff is brought to you because I had to wear a tie today, which doesn't happen every day, or even every season, and my boss complimented me on my slide-rule tie-tac. Geeks rule!

Ralph Peters has been very hot lately. It seems like I read an awful lot of quotes and references to Ralph every day recently. I think he's pretty insightful, although I don't agree with him 100% of the time.

This article, from Ralph yesterday, relates some very important information - namely that the Iraqi Army is succeeding, gradually, which means the whole US strategy in Iraq is succeeding, gradually - completely the opposite of what the MSM tells you.

This is what I expected, despite a lot of buffoonerousness at many levels in the US government. Although it isn't pretty or smooth, it does appear that we will eventually accomplish our objectives in Iraq - which is to create a strong, stable, at least somewhat democratic counterbalance to... the rest of our allies in the Arab world. (or perhaps I should say "the State Department's allies" - Saudi Arabia sure isn't MY ally.)

There are much bigger geopolitical issues in question, and the new Iraqi government sure isn't pretty if you look very close, but the really big point (which I have made before) is that Iraq is the main battle between freedom and Islamism - not a distraction as many, if not most, pundits and Washington DC-type-people claim.

In keeping with the "dramatic space news" theme:

The Mars Rover "Spirit" has been photographing an area of the Gusev crater called "home plate", and has returned some seriously dramatic imagery...



According to Space.com, the images of "home plate" have sparked "passionate debate" at NASA and in the scientific community about what they might mean.

Volcanic activity and hydroformed sediments are among the theories. I haven't heard anything about anyone at NASA say anything about "ruins of eons-old civilization".

These dramatic pictures come only days before the arrival in orbit of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a new probe that will offer unprecedented views of the Martian surface from a low polar orbit. This probe is a replacement for another Martian mission that  failed due to NASA's failure to accurately distinguish between metric and English measurements.

But since then, NASA's Martian fortunes have improved, and the most recent images from the Spirit Rover are truly historical, and could significantly change our understanding of the history of Mars. If you want to see something really impressive and interesting, take a look at the full scale image of "home plate" from NASA's site.

When I first discovered the internet in the early 1990s, it seemed to be all-conspiracy-theories-all-the-time. That was interesting to me because I love a mystery.

One of the favourite conspiracy theories or mysteries involved "black aircraft" allegedly flying out of Groom Lake, Nevada - the famous "Area 51".

There were several supposed "black aircraft" that were allegedly seen or glimpsed by eagle-eyed observers in the desert Southwest in the early-mid 90s', but the most famous and elusive was known as the "Aurora".

The name reportedly came from a single line item in the publicly-released version of the US defense budget in 1986, that some people believed represented a follow-on to the SR-71 program.

The "Aurora" was supposed to be a super-stealthy, hypersonic, trans-atmospheric reconnaissance aircraft powered by a pulse- detonation-wave engine, which launched from Area 51, flew into space, then landed at one of several landing fields around the world. Later on, the most serious "Aurora watchers" decided that the aircraft was actually a binary system, consisting of a "mother ship" (known, possibly, as the "Brilliant Buzzard"), and a smaller spaceplane - very much like the system used by Burt Rutan to win the X-Prize.



The mother ship was alleged to look very much like the long-cancelled XB-70 "Valkyrie" strategic bomber, only with an exotic hydrogen-ramjet engine, while the "Aurora" spaceplane was supposed to be very stealthy but roughly the size and shape of an F-111.



This design was later "validated" by a Testor's model kit, describing the Two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) system as the "SR-75 Penetrator" and the "XR-7 Thunderdart". The "Thunderdart" was the "Aurora" hypersonic spaceplane, while the "SR-75" was supposed to be the Brilliant Buzzard.

I remember thinking at the time "If any of this is true, eventually it will come out", and it never has. But there has been quite a bit of evidence over the years, including seismic evidence of hypersonic aircraft operating over the west coast, observations of the pulse-detonation-wave engine's distinctive "doughnuts on a rope" contrail (I even saw something kind of like this myself - over the Antelope valley in California), and quite a few sightings of the air vehicles themselves.

Gradually, many, if not all, internet aviation conspiracy buffs moved on to other things. Most of the best pages describing the technical and scientific background and evidence for a secret hypersonic spaceplane have disappeared. I hadn't thought about it in a while.

In more recent history, however, I have written about how aerospace technology seems to have only gone backwards in the last generation. We have never, publicly, flown higher or faster, in airplanes or spaceships, than we did in the 1960s, with the SR-71, the Apollo program, and the X-15 space-plane.

But all the evidence has made it seem that there wasn't really "anything out there", and the notion that the military was operating secret spacecraft seemed extremely unlikely.

Until today.

Today's Aviation Week and Space Technology says (with a clever question mark) that the Aurora two-stage-to-orbit program was real, flew for several years, and has recently been retired. The shocking article is filled with new and dramatic information, including technical details and eyewitness accounts from people "in the know".

The TSTO system was allegedly known as the "Blackstar", and was indeed the program referred to in the famous 1986 and 1987 DOD budget line-items. It was, according to the story, literally built from the leftover spare parts from the never-completed third XB-70 airframe and the early-1960's X-20 "Dyna Soar" space plane, which was the suddenly-cancelled (in 1963) follow-on to the X-15. It was, in turn, based on the Nazi "Amerika Bomber", AKA the Sanger Silverbird.

According to the story, following the retirement of the SR-71 and the explosion of the Space Shuttle CHALLENGER in the 1980s, the Congress authorized a ultra-secret, ultra-high-priority program to "ensure assured access to space". Lockheed and Boeing proposed a quick-reaction program, apparently based on plans dating from the 1960s to use the XB-70 as a launch platform for the Dyna-Soar. Interestingly, Boeing patented just such a design in 1989.

This program is offered as an explanation for why Lockheed and Boeing pulled out of the ill-fated National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program in the late 1980s, and why the Pentagon was eager to cancel the re-activation of the SR-71, the Air Force's unclassified space plane project, and the Army's anti-satellite missile program - because those capabilities were all rendered obsolete by the super-secret and already-flying "Blackstar".

I have no idea if any of this is really true.

On the one hand, I would have expected for something like this to leak or be revealed before now - especially if the design dates back to the early 1960s. Government just doesn't seem to be that good at keeping a secret.

On the other hand,  the F-117 stealth fighter was kept pretty secret for quite a while, even though pretty accurate rumors leaked out - just as seems to be the case with the Blackstar. And the repeated, seemingly-blase' cancellations of one "white world" spaceplane program after another (NASP, X-33, Delta Clipper) certainly could be construed as evidence that someone knows something the rest of us don't. Possibly as further evidence, in 2004 NASA transferred the X-37 low-cost spaceplane program to an "unnamed government agency".  NASA publicly stated at the time that "the government entity is classified".

And I understand the desirability of keeping an operational spaceplane secret. The idea is that we can control space - observing any spot on the earth in a totally unpredictable fashion, launching, recovering, or attacking satellites secretly, or even launching weapons against any target in the world totally covertly - is very strategically significant. Revealing this capability, even if we denied it had any offensive capability, would greatly reduce its advantages. Many other countries, including non-enemies, would likely feel compelled to develop technologies to counter it. It could lead to an "arms race in space", although this might be prohibitively expensive for the participants. Also revealing the technology could give other countries a huge head start - once they knew it could be done, and the general outlines of how, re-duplicating the capability would be greatly facilitated. From that perspective we are almost compelled to keep it secret.

The story says the system is being retired. If so, how come? What will replace it?  Don't we need an unclassified space shuttle replacement anyway? If it is real, and there is a need to keep it secret, but details are leaking out, then perhaps the logical next step is to leak a story that says "we had such a thing, but it wasn't really operational and now it's retired". A little research reveals that this story has been "leaking" in several directions at once lately -including on the "West Wing" TV show.

This story could change everything we (or at least I) believe about aerospace technology. It's like something straight out of "Stargate" - secret fleets of space fighters operated out of Area 51 by an ultra-secret sub-set of the Air Force. If you thought something like this was true, it might be pretty motivational for up-and-coming generations of young Air Force aviators.

I have, for many years, believed (and still believe) that the defense industrial complex is as degenerate and hopelessly corrupt as it appears to be and that the aviation industry - especially military aviation -  was pretty solidly established in a death spiral. I've based a lot of decisions about my own aspirations in aviation based on this apparent reality.

But if the apparent reality isn't, in fact, real, it could change an awful lot of things.

Haven't had a good satellite shot in a while...

I've been following the controversy over the impending transfer of management of several large US ports to the UAE firm DP World in the blog-o-sphere for the last several days. Most of the bloggers (that I read, anyway) seem to have come down on the side of the Bush Administration, arguing that we should not discriminate against the UAE, a crucial ally in the war on terrorism, just because they are Arabs. This seems pretty reasonable.

But how about discriminating against them because they are major facilitators for al Qaeda?

A few data points:

- Reportedly, a CIA attack on Osama in 1999 had to be cancelled because several senior UAE government leaders were visiting him at the time. It was thought it would look bad (for us? I've never followed that logic) if we took out prominent Emirati sheikhs in an attack on Osama in Afghanistan. The 9-11 Commission report refers to this:

No strike was launched. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on, and the immediate strike plans became moot.¹⁵⁸ According to CIA and Defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. Clarke told us the strike was called off after consultations with Director Tenet because the intelligence was dubious, and it seemed to Clarke as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America's best counterterrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schroen, felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the Bin Ladin unit chief, "Mike," agreed. Schroen believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.¹⁵⁹

- The 9/11 Commission report also refers to poor cooperation we received from the Emiratis before 9/11. They appeared to be trying hard to play on both sides of the fence:

The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem. From 1999 through early 2001, the United States, and President Clinton personally, pressed the UAE, one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from Afghanistan.¹⁶⁵ These efforts achieved little before 9/11.

In July 1999, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hamdan bin Zayid threatened to break relations with the Taliban over Bin Ladin.¹⁶⁶ The Taliban did not take him seriously, however. Bin Zayid later told an American diplomat that the UAE valued its relations with the Taliban because the Afghan radicals offered a counterbalance to "Iranian dangers" in the region, but he also noted that the UAE did not want to upset the United States.¹⁶⁷

I belive the UAE valued their relations with the Taliban more for economic reasons than because they "counterbalanced" the Iranians, which is nonsense.

- Also reportedly (by al Qaeda's own claim), the UAE government has been thoroughly infiltrated by al Qaeda operatives.

- In 1999, authorities in the UAE arrested and questioned 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah on his return to Dubai from Afghanistan, reportedly at the request of the CIA, but let him go. The CIA denies all this, but no one has ever answered the question about what Jarrah was doing in Dubai.

- Also in 1999, German intelligence warned the US about 9/11 hijacker Marwan al Shehhi, who was living in the UAE and plotting the 9/11 attacks. Neither the US nor the UAE did anything with this information.

- Sharjah, in the UAE, is the main base for Victor Bout's notorious global smuggling network, operating out of the Free Zone at the Sharjah Airport. The Sharjah Free Zone was allegedly set up by Richard Chichakli, who has been named a Specially Designated Terrorist Entity by the US Office of Foreign Asset Control, in cooperation with various prominent Emirati sheikhs.

- The prominent Emirati sheikh who owns DP World, the company which intends to manage the US ports,  is Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. I don't know what if anything he had to do with the Sharjah Free Zone, but Sulayem was in charge of the Dubai Customs and Port Authority for several  years, a position which he rapidly parlayed into literally tens of billions of dollars. Anyone who thinks that was all legal and above-board needs to do more homework. He was the creator and manager of the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which is similarly notorious as Sharjah as a haven for criminal activity.

While the UAE government in general has been more cooperative than most Arab states in the war on terrorism, the Emirates are a well known crossroads of illegal and terrorist activity. The Emiratis sometimes cooperate in cracking down (very occasionally) but usually look the other way. The Emirates are also not what we think of as a real nation-state, but rather a confederation of tribal sheikhdoms that operate on old-style Arab rules. They have not cooperated on investigating or extraditing anyone in a position of power or influence, and are harboring many major supporters of Islamic extremism in general and al Qaeda in particular. Rumors have long suggested that al Qaeda senior leadership visit the UAE for business or R&R.

That's enough for now. I suspect, but cannot yet establish, that Sulayem's other partners in DP World are a lot dirtier than he is. As I come up with that maybe I will publish it.

While I'm all in favour of not discriminating against allies in the war in terrorism just because they are Arabs, those in the blog-o-sphere who suggest that as the reason for being circumspect about turning over our major ports to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem need to do a little more research about what goes on in the UAE. While there may be some safeguards to our own port security regardless of who manages the port, you can bet that the world's masters of illicit trafficking - as the Emirati port managers are notorious for being - could use their position as manager of the ports to assist terrorists in circumventing that security if they were so inclined. And we have seen before, with Sharjah, with al Qaeda, and with various others, they are definitely so inclined.

Attack on Samarra shrine possibly traceable to al Qaeda

It appears likely that al Qaeda, and specifically Zarqawi are behind the demolition of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest shrines today in Samarra.

This may have been a strategic error by old Abu Musab. He's going to ignite a massive retribution against him, his al Qaeda sidekicks, and probably a lot of other Sunnis in Iraq by the Shi'a majority, and it's likely to be a body blow to al Qaeda's strategic plan that focuses on Iraq.

While I'm very sorry to see the history edifice destroyed, this event may represent a massive victory in the overall war against terrorism, handed to us for free by an increasingly marginalized and isolated Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Expect to see a massive condemnation ('takfir') of Zarqawi by Sunnis, including radical anti-regime Sunnis, in Iraq.