Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Geopolitical Diary: Russia, Obama and the S-300
December 18, 2008
There has been extensive discussion of the idea that U.S. President-elect Barack Obama might be tested early in his term by foreign powers, much as other presidents have been tested. If reports in the Russian media are correct, Obama’s first test is starting to take shape: According to RIA Novosti news agency, Russia is in the process of “implementing a contract” that would ultimately deliver the S-300 strategic air defense system to Iran.

Rumors concerning the S-300 have been on-again, off-again for years, but RIA Novosti reported that “Moscow has earlier met its obligations on supplying Tor-M1 systems to Iran and is currently implementing a contract to deliver S-300 systems.” The news agency also quoted Alexander Fomin, deputy head of the federal agency in charge of Russia’s military exports, as saying, “Russia’s military and technical cooperation with Iran has a positive impact on stability in this region.” Fomin added, “We have developed, are developing and will continue to develop this cooperation further. The region’s security to a large extent depends on this.” The article follows reports that an Israeli military delegation traveled to Moscow in recent days to try to dissuade Russia from delivering the weapons.

The importance of the S-300 — specifically the more modern PMU series — is that it would increase the difficulty of air attacks against Iran. The first stage of any attack is the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD). Except in the case of a sudden attack on a single target, SEAD is a precursor to any sustained air campaign, and given the relatively large number of Iranian nuclear sites, taking out those facilities would involve such an extended campaign. Having to suppress a series of S-300PMU batteries would extend substantially the number of sorties and the time required for this phase of the attack.

This would affect both Israeli and American calculations. Given the size of Israel’s air force and the distances involved, the additional attrition and time involved in the SEAD phase might well extend an Iran campaign beyond Israel’s capabilities. It is not clear whether the S-300 would take a conventional Israeli option off the table, but it certainly would make things more difficult should Israel decide to carry out the attack. The United States would have greater ability to make such a move, but Washington’s recent agreement with Baghdad stipulates that Iraq cannot be used as a base for attacks against neighboring countries. And the Turks do not want the Americans to attack Iran from their soil. Put simply, the introduction of the S-300 would push the difficulty of a non-nuclear attack to the limit for Israel and complicate matters for the United States.

Of course, this is what the Russians mean to do. We do not know what happened during the conversations U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger held in Moscow in recent days, but the Russians clearly have decided to turn up the heat. Russia has shifted its position from not wanting to increase tensions through the sale of the S-300 to seeing the sale as stabilizing the region — which it would do at the expense of potentially reducing U.S. and Israeli options.

Moscow does not want the Iranians to have nuclear weapons, but the Russian view is that the Iranians are rather far away from developing them. The more important issue for Russia is forcing the Americans to recognize Moscow’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union - by withdrawing their support for Ukraine, Georgia and other countries in the region. For the United States, the Iranian issue has been a priority. The Russians have just made it clear that if the Americans do not give them what they want, they will complicate U.S. policy on Iran as much as they can.

Obama takes office in about a month. It is not clear what point the Russians have reached in actually transferring S-300s, but in a month’s time, they could be either on the verge of transferring or already in the process. That means Obama will be forced to respond very quickly to Russia’s action. His options include forcing some sort of confrontation with the Russians; doing nothing, and thus accepting Russia’s intrusion into a core American interest; moving rapidly to deal with Iran; or (and we doubt intensely that he would choose this option) moving to strike Iran before the S-300s become operational.

It may be that American defense analysts will conclude that the S-300 does not significantly affect the balance of power in the region. But the S-300 does affect the psychological balance. The Iranians will feel that they are far less isolated than the Americans want them to feel, and that change alone will have a significant effect. Whether viewed militarily or politically, Russia’s action matters.

This is not a situation on the scale of the Cuban missile crisis, but it is a significant challenge to American interests on Russia’s part. If Obama does nothing, he will be seen as weak; if he gives the Russians what they want, he will be seen as an appeaser. And if he moves toward a major crisis or even military action, he will be seen as overly aggressive. With this move, Russia’s aim was to push Obama into a corner and say, in Russian, “Welcome to the big leagues.”

"It may certainly be soon to tell if the last few decades  are a turning point but the statistics are currently not in favor  of feminism/working mothers causing  rising violence and the breakdown of society."

Delivered with panache and wit but I stilll insist upon the point that mothers matter and when they disappear from their children's lives the consequences are profound.

Exactly so. 

I am in most hearty agreement with BBG about the primal importance of what is at stake here.

Can David Paterson Say 'No' to a Kennedy?

Media reaction to news that Caroline Kennedy is actively seeking appointment to the U.S. Senate seat held by Hillary Clinton was certainly different from how the media responded to Sarah Palin's arrival on the national stage. Mrs. Palin may have been a mayor, chairwoman of a major state regulatory commission and a governor, but her entrance into big-time politics was widely ridiculed.

In contrast, the 51-year-old Ms. Kennedy is a shy and private person who has never held a job in public life beyond her 22 months planning strategic partnerships for New York City's public schools. She has co-authored books such as "The Right to Privacy" and also co-chaired Barack Obama's vice-presidential selection committee.

But her political experience is painfully limited. A family friend, noting that she had never campaigned for anyone outside her immediate family before Mr. Obama, had to reach in explaining to Newsweek magazine that she could handle the rigors of campaigning. "She worked rope lines and spoke at campaign stops for Obama and was not turned off by that," the friend said. "In fact, she enjoyed herself."

There is no doubt Ms. Kennedy could raise tens of millions of dollars for the two Senate races she would have to run in quick succession -- one in 2010 for the remaining two years of Mrs. Clinton's term and another in 2012 for a full six-year term. She no doubt would also receive the same kind of kid-glove treatment from most of the media that Barack Obama has.

But don't count on a Kennedy continuing the dynasty that has kept a member of the family in the U.S. Senate for all but two of the last 56 years. A key factor in who will be appointed to the Senate seat is how the selection would benefit the political interests of New York Governor David Paterson, the man who will make the decision.

Mr. Paterson is himself a governor who happened into his job by accident after the spectacular fall of Eliot Spitzer. With a slowing economy, the prospect of massive tax increases and a volatile group of special interests making demands on the state's budget, his job in winning a full term in his own right won't be easy.

That's why the safest choice for Mr. Paterson might be to appoint state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has been viewed as a possible primary challenger to the governor in 2010. Promoting Mr. Cuomo would remove the largest single obstacle to Mr. Paterson's election to the office he now holds, but it might also irritate women voters who were used to having Mrs. Clinton represent New York in the nation's capital.

"My heart goes out to David Paterson," Democratic political strategist Dan Gerstein says. "He's sadly become the grand champion of the no-win situation. No matter who he picks, he will alienate a lot of different communities."

Now, with Ms. Kennedy's openly public interest in going to the U.S. Senate, the question is whether he is willing to "just say no" to the Democratic Party's most powerful family dynasty.

-- John Fund

Obama's School Choice Is to Punt

In picking Chicago public schools chief Arne Duncan to be his Education Secretary, Barack Obama chose a middle course between appointing a fiery reformer and a favorite of the politically powerful teachers' unions that backed his candidacy.

Mr. Obama had been under pressure from liberals to appoint Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor viewed as an "old guard" defender of the educational status quo. On the other hand, many of his business supporters were backing Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City's public schools and someone who has often confronted teacher unions.

Mr. Obama instead opted for Mr. Duncan, a friend and Hyde Park neighbor who has often played basketball with the President-elect. Nonetheless, education reformers pronounced themselves pleased with the choice. Whitney Tilson, a founder of Democrats for Education Reform, said he had been impressed by Mr. Duncan's support for merit pay for teachers and willingness to shut down some failing public schools. Mr. Tilson said Mr. Duncan had been able to bring "real change" to the nation's third largest public school system and was the "perfect balance of being strong and getting what he wants and doing it in a way that wins."

All that may be true, but after seven years of Mr. Duncan's tenure in Chicago, its schools still remain seriously troubled. Mr. Obama, for his part, certainly never entrusted his own children to the Chicago public school system -- even schools in the affluent Hyde Park neighborhood where he lived. Instead, he sent both of his children to private schools -- as he intends to do when he moves to Washington, D.C.

-- John Fund

Quote of the Day

"For the last decade or so, the Democrats have not been as strong on education reform as the Republicans have. The Republicans have been much, much better, in my opinion, on ensuring strict accountability for schools and for districts, for ensuring that people are held responsible for closing the achievement gap and significantly increasing student achievement levels for every single child. What worries me about the Democrats is that they tend to be softer on these things, and soft is not what we need right now. Allowing schools to continue to fail year in and year out without significant ramifications either to the district or to the school is doing a disservice to the children. . . . I don't think it's too much for the children of this country to ask for to have somebody who's leading the education system who is always going to put their interests first and foremost, who is not going to care about the politics, the political flak, how many adults get mad at them, keeping the adults happy" -- District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, on why despite being an Obama voter she is "somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education," in an interview with NationalJournal.com's Amy Harder.

What If Sarah Palin Had Come from Chicago and Barack Obama from Alaska?

What's the difference between a hockey mom and a Chicago pol?

Apparently, it's more than lipstick. During the presidential campaign, Sarah Palin was criticized for having too thin a résumé to be vice president. But one portion of her record stands out now as being particularly relevant in the wake of Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich's arrest last week and Barack Obama's long-standing silence of Chicago ethics.

In 2003, Ms. Palin was appointed chairwoman and ethics supervisor of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission by then-Gov. Frank Murkowski. Before long she spotted what appeared to be ethical violations by fellow Republicans and also found the governor's response to be so sluggish that it bordered on willful blindness. The two Republicans she pointed fingers at were Randy Ruedrich, the state GOP chairman and a fellow oil and gas commissioner, and Gregg Renkes, the state's attorney general. Her beef with Mr. Ruedrich was that he appeared to be too close to a company he was supposed to be regulating. And Mr. Renkes appeared to have a financial conflict of interest in negotiating a coal-exporting trade agreement.

Mrs. Palin blew the whistle internally on both men. When nothing happened, she quit less than two years into her term. Later, when she was criticized by some Republicans for unfairly pointing an accusatory finger, she penned an op-ed and, using her famous hockey-mom metaphor, underlined the importance of holding government officials -- even members of her own party -- to high ethical standards. The incident cemented her reputation as a reformer when both men were later forced to resign and Mr. Ruedrich paid a $12,000 fine. Mrs. Palin went on to unseat Mr. Murkowski in a hard-fought GOP primary in 2006.

Compare this record to Mr. Obama's. An ethical cloud has been hanging over Mr. Blagojevich for years. We now know federal officials began looking into his affairs within months after he was elected in 2002. Mr. Obama came up in Chicago politics, shared at least one fundraiser with Mr. Blagojevich -- Tony Rezko, who was recently convicted of fraud and bribery -- and several other acquaintances, including top labor officials. But he apparently never saw any reason to publicly question the governor's ethics. In the past week the Obama camp has been compiling a list of contacts with Mr. Blagojevich and his inner circle since Election Day, which it will supposedly release next week. When that list comes out, let's hope it accurately portrays the overlap between the Obama and Blagojevich circles in Chicago. The question that will remain, however, is why didn't Mr. Obama ever assume the type of leadership role Mrs. Palin did in moving against public corruption within his own party and state?

-- Brendan Miniter

Interesting BBG.  I wonder what Michael Yon is saying about all this?

Anyway, in a totall different vein, here's this from the WSJ:

Every visitor to Pakistan has seen them: 20-foot tall roadside replicas of a remote mountain where, a decade ago, Pakistan conducted its first overt nuclear tests. This is what the country's leaders -- military, secular, Islamist -- consider their greatest achievement.

 
AP
A model of Chaghi mountain, the site of Pakistan's nuclear test.
So here's a modest proposal: Let's buy their arsenal.

A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear program (and midwife to a few others), likes to point out what a feat it was that a country "where we can't even make a bicycle chain" could succeed at such an immense technological task. He exaggerates somewhat: Pakistan got its bomb largely through a combination of industrial theft, systematic violation of Western export controls, and a blueprint of a weapon courtesy of Beijing.

Still, give Mr. Khan this: Thanks partly to his efforts, a country that has impoverished the great mass of its own people, corruptly enriched a tiny handful of elites, served as a base of terrorism against its neighbors, lost control of its intelligence services, radicalized untold numbers of Muslims in its madrassas, handed the presidency to a man known as Mr. 10%, and proliferated nuclear technology to Libya and Iran (among others) has, nevertheless, made itself a power to be reckoned with. Congratulations.

But if Pakistanis thought a bomb would be a net national asset, they miscalculated. Yes, Islamabad gained parity with its adversaries in New Delhi, gained prestige in the Muslim world, and gained a day of national pride, celebrated every May 28.

What Pakistan didn't gain was greater security. "The most significant reality was that the bomb promoted a culture of violence which . . . acquired the form of a monster with innumerable heads of terror," wrote Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy earlier this year. "Because of this bomb, we can definitely destroy India and be destroyed in its response. But its function is limited to this."

In 2007, some 1,500 Pakistani civilians were killed in terrorist attacks. None of those attacks were perpetrated by India or any other country against which Pakistan's warheads could be targeted, unless it aimed at itself. But Pakistan's nuclear arsenal has made it an inviting target for the jihadists who blew up Islamabad's Marriott hotel in September and would gladly blow up the rest of the capital as a prelude to taking it over.

The day that happens may not be so very far off. President Asif Ali Zardari was recently in the U.S. asking for $100 billion to stave off economic collapse. So far, the international community has ponied up about $15 billion. That puts Mr. Zardari $85 billion shy of his fund-raising target. Meantime, the average Taliban foot soldier brings home monthly wages that are 30% higher than uniformed Pakistani security personnel.

Preventing the disintegration of Pakistan, perhaps in the wake of a war with India (how much restraint will New Delhi show after the next Mumbai-style atrocity?), will be the Obama administration's most urgent foreign-policy challenge. Since Mr. Obama has already committed a trillion or so in new domestic spending, what's $100 billion in the cause of saving the world?

Today in Opinion Journal
 

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Barack Obama-sanCondi's Korean FailureThe Sole of Liberation

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

Global View: Let's Buy Pakistan's Nukes
– Bret StephensMain Street: Gitmo Lawyers Are the Latest in Radical Chic
– William McGurn

COMMENTARY

The Return of Realpolitik in Arabia
– Fouad AjamiThe Lessons From 30 Years of Chinese Reform
– Hugo RestallHow Blackwater Serves America
– Erik D. PrinceBankruptcy Is the Perfect Remedy for Detroit
– Todd J. ZywickiThis is the deal I have in mind. The government of Pakistan would verifiably eliminate its entire nuclear stockpile and the industrial base that sustains it. In exchange, the U.S. and other Western donors would agree to a $100 billion economic package, administered by an independent authority and disbursed over 10 years, on condition that Pakistan remain a democratic and secular state (no military rulers; no Sharia law). It would supplement that package with military aid similar to what the U.S. provides Israel: F-35 fighters, M-1 tanks, Apache helicopters. The U.S. would also extend its nuclear umbrella to Pakistan, just as Hillary Clinton now proposes to do for Israel.

A pipe dream? Not necessarily. People forget that the world has subtracted more nuclear powers over the past two decades than it has added: Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and South Africa all voluntarily relinquished their stockpiles in the 1990s. Libya did away with its program in 2003 when Moammar Gadhafi concluded that a bomb would be a net liability, and that he had more to gain by coming to terms with the West.

There's no compelling reason Mr. Zardari and his military brass shouldn't reach the same conclusion, assuming excellent terms and desperate circumstances. Sure, a large segment of Pakistanis will never agree. Others, who have subsisted on a diet of leaves and grass so Pakistan could have its bomb, might take a more pragmatic view.

The tragedy of Pakistan is that it remains a country that can't do the basics, like make a bicycle chain. If what its leaders want is prestige, prosperity and lasting security, they could start by creating an economy that can make one -- while unlearning how to make the bomb.

A Coat of Many Proteins May Be This Parasite’s Downfall
NYT
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: December 15, 2008

If you return from a trip abroad to find you have projectile vomiting, roaring flatulence, sulfurous belching and explosive diarrhea, the bad news is that you won’t die; you just have an attack of giardiasis, a form of purgatory devised by the single-celled parasite known as giardia.

SHIFTY When giardia must wear all its 190 coat proteins at once instead of selecting one and changing it often, it cannot hide from the immune system.

Giardia infections can linger for months because the parasite plays a cunning defense against the body’s immune system. In its genomic wardrobe, it has 190 coats to choose from. As soon as the immune system has generated antibodies against one coat, giardia switches to another. Because of the parasite’s persistence and infectivity, some 280 million cases of giardiasis occur in the world each year, the World Health Organization estimates, though most of these are in developing countries where people are more inured to the disease.

Giardia’s offensive game could have a fatal weakness, however. Biologists led by Hugo D. Luján at the Catholic University of Córdoba in Argentina have gained a striking insight into its coat-shuffling stratagem.

With this knowledge, they have accomplished a cunning counterploy: they have forced the parasite to make and wear all its coat proteins at the same time. This altered parasite, they hope, should serve as the perfect vaccine, because it immunizes the body to the full repertoire of giardia’s coat proteins all at once. The idea has worked well in animal tests, Dr. Luján said.

He thinks the same general approach — forcing expression of all coat proteins simultaneously — might help produce vaccines against the other protozoan parasites that rely on coat switching to dodge the immune system. These include malaria and the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness and Leishmaniasis.

Dr. Luján and his team have identified the mechanism by which giardia controls its coat proteins, they report in the current issue of Nature. Each of the parasite’s 190 coat genes is the recipe for making a different protein, and the parasite switches its coat every 10 generations or so. To produce the coat, giardia does not switch these genes on one at a time, as might be expected. Instead, it seems to leave them all turned on, allowing each to generate a messenger RNA copy of itself. Usually the messenger RNAs would direct the synthesis of proteins, but giardia then destroys all but one of the messengers, and the survivor makes the coat of the day.

To kill its messenger RNAs, giardia has adapted an ancient cellular system known as RNA interference. The system is designed to destroy foreign RNA, like that of invading viruses, so it was surprising to find it regulating a cell’s own RNAs, Dr. Luján said.

He proved this was the case by disrupting giardia’s production of enzymes, like those known as Dicer and Argonaute, that are components of the RNA interference system. With its RNA selection system out of business, giardia produces many — Dr. Luján believes probably all — of the coat proteins in its repertoire and inserts them into its outer covering.

He said he did not yet know how the organism shifted between coats but suspected that the RNA interference system favored whichever messenger RNA happened to be the most abundant at the time, and destroyed all others.

In an experiment that has not yet been published, Dr. Luján has tested gerbils, the laboratory animal often used in giardia work, with a vaccine consisting just of giardia with its RNA interference system blocked. “We saw complete protection,” he said.

Dr. Theodore E. Nash, a leading expert on giardia at the National Institutes of Health, said the new report was “a major advance in the field.” Since 1979, Dr. Nash has developed many of the methods to study giardia and its coat shuffling, several of which were used by Dr. Luján, who worked for five years in Dr. Nash’s lab.

Another giardia expert, Dr. Rodney Adam of the University of Arizona, said Dr. Luján’s work on giardia’s coat gene control was interesting “but not the whole story.” As for making a vaccine, he said that “this is not an organism to which natural infection will confer immunity.” People in developing countries may get one infection after another, although they do get a much less severe form of the disease.

Malaria also evades the immune system by switching its protein coat. Dr. Kirk Deitsch, an expert on malaria coat genes at the Weill Cornell Medical College, said Dr. Luján’s new finding “may be conceptually applicable to malaria,” although the malaria parasite does not use RNA interference and no one yet knows how to make it display all its 60 coat protein genes at once.

A human vaccine for giardia could be of great benefit if the many mild cases in the developing world do in fact undermine health. Some experts believe persistent giardia infection causes malnutrition, but others are less sure of this.

For the much smaller number of Westerners who are not inured to the disease, a vaccine would be a welcome addition to the few available drugs. It would have been a godsend for the Crusaders, who are known from historical accounts to have suffered terribly from a variety of intestinal diseases that had no respect for rank. In 1249 King Louis IX, who led the Seventh Crusade, had such serious diarrhea that part of the monarch’s breeches were cut away to ease his personal hygiene. Giardia may well have been his tormentor. Using a sensitive immunological test, researchers who excavated a medieval latrine in the city of Acre, once part of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, detected the presence of giardia, they reported in the July issue of The Journal of Archaeological Science.

Giardia itself is far more ancient than any Crusader kingdom. Though a single-celled organism, it belongs to the eukaryotes, the domain that includes all plants and animals. In the tree of eukaryotic life, giardia belongs to one of the earliest branches. It lacks mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles that are almost a badge of eukaryote identity. Even stranger, each giardia cell possesses two nuclei; no one knows what benefit offsets the cost of maintaining the second. Before this enigmatic microbe plagued people, it was doubtless the scourge of many earlier species. Dr. Luján’s discovery may be a critical step in curbing giardia’s merciless torment of its fellow eukaryotes.

The NYTimes in typical form

Pirates Outmaneuver Warships Off Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: December 15, 2008
ON THE ARABIAN SEA — Rear Adm. Giovanni Gumiero is going on a pirate hunt.

Italian sailors on patrol on the Arabian Sea. Pirates based in Somalia are still able to operate in the area.

An Italian naval destroyer, foreground, escorted a merchant vessel that was carrying a cargo of humanitarian aid to Somalia in November.

From the deck of an Italian destroyer cruising the pirate-infested waters off Somalia’s coast, he has all the modern tools at his fingertips — radar, sonar, infrared cameras, helicopters, a cannon that can sink a ship 10 miles away — to take on a centuries-old problem that harks back to the days of schooners and eye patches.

“Our presence will deter them,” the admiral said confidently.

But the wily buccaneers of Somalia’s seas do not seem especially deterred — instead, they seem to be getting only wilier. More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.

And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.

The pirates are recalibrating their tactics, attacking ships in beelike swarms of 20 to 30 skiffs, and threatening to choke off one of the busiest shipping arteries in the world, at the mouth of the Red Sea.

United Nations officials recently estimated that Somali pirates had netted as much as $120 million this year in ransom payments — an astronomical sum for a country whose economy has been gutted by 17 years of chaos and war. Some shipping companies are now rerouting their vessels to avoid Somalia’s waters, detouring thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa.

The pirates are totally outgunned. They continue to cruise around in fiberglass skiffs with assault rifles and at best a few rocket-propelled grenades. One Italian officer said that going after them in a 485-foot-long destroyer, bristling with surface-to-air missiles and torpedoes, was like “going after someone on a bicycle with a truck.”

But the pirates — true to form — remain unfazed.

“They can’t stop us,” said Jama Ali, one of the pirates aboard a Ukrainian freighter packed with weapons that was hijacked in September and was still being held.

He explained how he and his men hid out on a rock near the narrow mouth of the Red Sea and waited for the big gray ships with the guns to pass before pouncing on slow-moving tankers. Even if foreign navies nab some members of his crew, Mr. Jama said, he is not worried. He said his men would probably get no more punishment than a free ride back to the beach, which has happened several times.

“We know international law,” Mr. Jama said.

Western diplomats have said that maritime law can be as murky as the seas. Several times this year, the Danish Navy captured men they suspected to be pirates, only to dump them on shore after the Danish government decided it did not have jurisdiction.

The American warships surrounding the hijacked Ukrainian freighter have intercepted several small skiffs going to the freighter, but let the men aboard go because American officials said they did not want to put the freighter’s crew in danger.

This seeming impunity is especially infuriating to the new cadre of private security guards, fresh from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, hired to tag along on merchant voyages to add a layer of protection. Burly men with tattooed forearms and shaved heads sipping Heineken and checking their watches are now common sights on the beaches of Oman, Kenya and Djibouti. They have their own ideas for dealing with seafaring outlaws.

“We should make ’em walk the plank,” one British security guard said.

Despite tough talk, the guards are unarmed (because most countries do not allow them to bring weapons into port), so they are often forced to confront machine-gun-toting pirates with fire hoses.

Or worse. There was even a recent case, according to several security contractors, in which Filipino crew members pelted pirates with tomatoes in an attempt to stop them from scaling the hull of their ship. It did not work.

The Italian naval officers say the piracy patrols are helping — already the Italians have rescued several merchant vessels surrounded by pirate skiffs. The Italian destroyer is part of a NATO mission that began in October.

“But the answer is to have a good, strong government on land,” Admiral Gumiero said. “That’s the only way to end this, for sure.”
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That said, strong government is nowhere to be found. The piracy epidemic is not so much a separate problem as a symptom of the failed state of Somalia — a place crawling with guns, gangs and criminals that has not had a functioning central government since 1991.

In Xarardheere, much of the economy is based on piracy.


 Many Somalia analysts think that it is about to get even worse. The Ethiopian military, which has been shoring up a weak and unpopular transitional Somali government, says it will pull out within a month.

The transitional government, split by poisonous infighting, seems on the brink of collapse. Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda are poised to take over. Famine is steadily creeping toward millions of people, many withering away in plastic huts that are no match for the intense sun or the drenching rains.

United Nations officials are swinging into crisis mode, calling high-level meetings in East Africa and New York to address piracy and the greater Somali mess. Some United Nations officials are pushing to send in peacekeepers, but no countries are rushing to offer troops.

Some American officials have proposed chasing the pirates on the shore and raiding their dens, which are well known but so far untouched. Somalia’s transitional leaders, anxious for any help, said they would welcome that.

“This is a cancer and it’s growing,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, an ambassador at large for the transitional federal government. “We have to extract it once and for all.”

More than 100 ships have been attacked off Somalia’s coast in 2008, far more than in any previous year on record. The economic costs are piling up, with higher insurance payments for shippers, higher fuel costs because of detours and new private security bills, not to mention the million-dollar ransom payments.

The cash-starved Egyptian government is poised to lose billions of dollars if ships from the Middle East and Asia stop using the Suez Canal, one of Egypt’s biggest foreign-exchange earners, and go around Africa instead.

But the end of piracy could be an economic catastrophe — for many Somalis. Their country exports almost nothing these days, and more legitimate forms of business have largely died off.

Entire clans and coastal villages now survive off piracy, with women baking bread for pirates, men and boys guarding hostages, and others serving as scouts, gunmen, mechanics, accountants and skiff builders. Traders make a nice cut off the water, fuel and cigarettes needed to sustain such oceangoing voyages.

Pirates are known as the best customers of all.

“They pay $20 for a $5 bottle of perfume,” said Leyla Ahmed, a shopkeeper in Xarardheere, a notorious pirate den on the Somali coast.

Maritime experts say that the naval efforts will take time. “Let’s wait and see,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London. “You must appreciate it’s a very large stretch of water, a massive area,” he said, referring to the several hundred thousand square miles of sea where the naval ships are patrolling.

Then there is the nettlesome question of what to do with the pirates. Italian officers on pirate patrol seemed uncomfortable at the thought of actually capturing a real live pirate. There is not even a brig or place to hold the pirates on the destroyer.

“Our main goal is providing safe passage,” said Fabrizio Simoncini, the destroyer’s captain.

So far, they have done a decent job at that, escorting at least eight humanitarian ships, with 30,000 tons of badly needed aid for Somalia.

The Indian Navy recently announced that it had arrested 23 pirates, though it is not clear where the suspects would be prosecuted. Last week in Nairobi, Kenya, at an antipiracy conference, British officials outlined a plan for their navy to capture Somali pirates and hand them over to Kenyan courts.

But according to Kenneth Randall, dean of the University of Alabama School of Law and an international law scholar, “Any country can arrest these guys and prosecute them at home, under domestic laws that apply.

“I’m actually surprised people think it’s unclear,” he said. “The law on piracy is 100 percent clear.”

He said that international customary law going back hundreds of years had defined pirates as criminals who robbed and stole on the high seas. Because the crimes were committed in international waters, he said, all countries had not only the authority but also the obligation to apprehend and prosecute them.

The Italians clearly have the resources. Out on the front lines, or front waves, beefy Italian marines prowl the decks with machine guns. Radar screens blip and beep. Sailors make announcements over the destroyer’s radio, telling nearby cargo ships to put out an S O S with their position as soon as they spot any pirates.

The Italians said that, deep down, pirates were creatures of the sea, no matter how many navy ships were hot on their tail. “When the sea is calm, the moon is bright, the weather is good, it’s easy to see how the pirates are encouraged,” said Enrico Vignola, a lieutenant on the ship.

For visitors on board, lunchtime was the highlight. The officers summoned up from the oily bowels of the destroyer a banquet of homemade pasta, marinated eggplant sliced paper thin, prosciutto-wrapped dates and tiramisu, finished off with cool glasses of spumante.

It seems that when Italians hunt for pirates, they hunt in style.

"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head."

--Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788

Third post of day:

THE GIPPER
"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business." --Ronald Reagan

These seem like some fair points to me , , ,

"Anyone who relies solely on MSM outlets ... may not even know that Obama has, to this day, not authorized the state of Hawaii to release his Certificate of Live Birth -- the 'long form' -- to prove that he is a 'natural born citizen' (NBC), a Constitutional requirement of all presidents. Instead, We, the People, have online access to an Obama document known as a Certification of Live Birth, which, as Randall Hoven explains at American Thinker blog, is a computer-generated short form that is not even accepted by the Hawaii Department of Home Lands as adequate verification of Hawaiian identity. ... Further dimming the online document's Holy Grail aspects, it has been altered -- the certificate's number has been redacted -- which, according to a statement printed on the document, actually invalidates it. But that's not all. Back on Oct. 31, Hawaii's director of health, along with the registrar of Vital Statistics, released a statement verifying that the Hawaii's Department of Health has Obama's 'original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.' Well, that's just great. But no matter how many times this statement from 'Hawaiian authorities' is cited as the NBC clincher, it doesn't prove a thing. It turns out, as Hoven reports, that Hawaii issues birth certificates even for babies born elsewhere, so simply having an original Hawaiian birth certificate 'on record' doesn't answer the key questions. Namely: What exactly does this original birth certificate say? And why doesn't Obama simply authorize the document's release and be done with the question? ... I think it is nothing less than good citizenship to seek to verify that Obama is a 'natural born citizen' since our elites, which include the major political parties and the MSM, failed to bring the matter to its extremely simple resolution long ago. But while important, this isn't just a story about whether we as Americans are right or wrong to ask our president-elect the question about his original birth certificate. It is about whether our president-elect is right or wrong not to answer it." --columnist Diana West

Second post of the morning

FOIA docs show feds can lojack mobiles without telco help
By Julian Sanchez | Published: November 16, 2008 - 10:45PM CT

Related StoriesCourt: warrant needed to turn cell phone into homing beacon

Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that "triggerfish" technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all.

Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone's precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.

This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI's cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they've received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.

 As one of the documents intended to provide guidance for DOJ employees explains, triggerfish can be deployed "without the user knowing about it, and without involving the cell phone provider." That may be significant because the legal rulings requiring law enforcement to meet a high "probable cause" standard before acquiring cell location records have, thus far, pertained to requests for information from providers, pursuant to statutes such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and the Stored Communications Act.


The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices—which allow tracking of incoming and outgoing calls from a phone subject to much less stringent evidentiary standards—to gather location data. "By its very terms," according to the manual, "this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities.Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones." 


Perhaps surprisingly, it's only with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 that the government has needed any kind of court order to use triggerfish. While previously, the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology. Under the updated definition, these explicitly include any "device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information."

U.S. President George W. Bush made what is likely his final trip as president to Iraq on Sunday. During the trip, he discussed what progress had been made while reiterating that the war there has not yet been won decisively. Bush was undoubtedly correct on both counts, but in a sense, these are no longer the key (or at least the only) questions that have to be asked in evaluating the Iraq war.

We have discussed the reasoning behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq innumerable times, and the issue certainly has been debated to the point that it is unlikely there is anyone left who hasn’t made up his mind on the subject. The point that significant progress has been made but that the situation remains fluid strikes us as fairly uncontroversial. Few deny that progress has been made; few would say the war is over.

There are four ways to evaluate the Iraq war. First, was the U.S. goal in the war worthy of the effort it required? Second, did the war achieve its intended goal? Third, was the war effort executed effectively? And finally, did the war have unintended consequences elsewhere? This last issue has always been discussed in terms of international hostility toward the United States or radicalization in the Muslim world. These subjects are worthy of discussion, but to our minds, the greatest unintended consequence of the Iraq war was the opportunity it provided for other states to enhance their power. The United States’ commitment to Iraq provided the world with breathing room and space for maneuver that it otherwise might not have had.

For five years, the bulk of American ground war-fighting capability was committed to Iraq. During that time, the threat posed by American power declined. Venezuela, for example, with all its talk about an American invasion, knew perfectly well that the United States was in no position to think about Caracas. This gave Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez room for maneuver that he otherwise might not have felt he had. In another example, there is much discussion of the need to intervene in Darfur. Whatever the wisdom of such an action, the Sudanese government has known the United States was in no position to play a leading role in such an operation. And whatever threats Washington might have made against Pakistan, Islamabad knew perfectly well that a multidivisional attack was not an option. With U.S. land power off the table for five years, the American ability to shape the world through threats and actions was severely diminished.

Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the former Soviet Union. Russia is intrinsically weaker than the United States, but military power is not an abstract relationship. Judging military power is a question of which side can bring more power to bear in a certain place at a certain time. In a country like Georgia this past summer, Russian power was greater than American power — and this is now true throughout the Russian periphery. Moscow is now free to reshape the former Soviet Union without fear of meaningful American intervention. This fact is obvious to all of these countries, and it conditions their responses.

One can argue that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was justified, and one can also argue that the war was executed as effectively as possible. But Bush nailed the indisputable problem: the war is still not over. The fact that the war has taken too long from a global perspective is, to us, the key issue that is rarely discussed. It is not the situation on the ground in Iraq that frames the question of the war; it is the war’s effect on American strategic power around the world.

Because the Iraq war has lasted as long as it has, it has opened doors for other countries – doors that would have been closed had it been possible to end the war more quickly. The fact that the Iraq war is still continuing, and that it likely will last at least another 18 months, has created strategic consequences — independent of the question of the wisdom of the war in the first place. Even if the Iraq war were to end with a U.S. victory tomorrow, it nevertheless has brought with it profound strategic costs.

"'Tis well."

--George Washington, last words, 14 December 1799

Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo get more press, but among the most urgent national security challenges facing President-elect Obama is what to do about America's stockpile of aging nuclear weapons. No less an authority than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the situation "bleak" and is urging immediate modernization.

 
Department of Defense
Robert Gates.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Gates's new boss appeared to take a different view. Candidate Obama said he "seeks a world without nuclear weapons" and vowed to make "the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy." His woolly words have given a boost to the world disarmament movement, including last week's launch of Global Zero, the effort by Richard Branson and Queen Noor to eliminate nuclear weapons in 25 years. Naturally, they want to start with cuts in the U.S. arsenal.

But the reality of power has a way of focusing those charged with defending the U.S., and Mr. Obama will soon have to decide to modernize America's nuclear deterrent or let it continue to deteriorate. Every U.S. warhead is more than 20 years old, with some dating to the 1960s. The last test was 1992, when the U.S. adopted a unilateral test moratorium and since relied on computer modeling. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists with experience designing and building nuclear weapons are retiring or dying, and young Ph.D.s have little incentive to enter a field where innovation is taboo. The U.S. has zero production capability, beyond a few weapons in a lab.

Background Reading
 

COMMENTARY

A World Free of Nuclear Weapons (01/04/07)
– George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam NunnToward a Nuclear-Free World (01/15/08)
– George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

Gen. Kevin Chilton: Sounding the Nuclear Alarm (11/22/08)
– Melanie KirkpatrickWe're told Mr. Gates's alarm will be echoed soon in a report by the Congressionally mandated commission charged with reviewing the role of nuclear weapons and the overall U.S. strategic posture. The commission's chairman is William Perry, a former Clinton Defense Secretary and a close Obama adviser. Mr. Perry is also one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," the nickname given to him, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn for an op-ed published in these pages last year offering a blueprint for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

The commission's interim report is due out any day now, and the advance word is that Mr. Perry has come back to Earth. We're told the report's central finding is that the U.S. will need a nuclear deterrent for the indefinite future. A deterrent is credible, the report further notes, only if enemies believe it will work. That means modernization.

That logic ought to be obvious, but it escapes many in Congress who have stymied the Bush Administration's efforts to modernize. Britain, France, Russia and China are all updating their nuclear forces, but Mr. Bush couldn't even get Congress this year to fund so much as R&D for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. Senator Dianne Feinstein dismissed the RRW, saying "the Bush Administration's goal was to reopen the nuclear door."

In today's Opinion Journal
 

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Madoff and MarketsDisarming OurselvesIran's YouTube Generation

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

The Americas: Innocents Die in the Drug War
– Mary Anastasia O'GradyInformation Age: Internet Attacks Are a Real and Growing Problem
– L. Gordon Crovitz

COMMENTARY

Bush Blinks on the Auto Bailout
– Paul IngrassiaThe Fed Still Has Plenty of Ammunition
– Frederic S. MishkinIt's Time to Junk the Electoral College
– Jonathan SorosIn the House, similar damage has been done by Ellen Tauscher, chairman of the subcommittee on strategic weapons. Ms. Tauscher, whose California district includes the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, likes to talk about a strong nuclear deterrent while bragging about killing the RRW. She also wants to revive the unenforceable Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate rejected in 1999. Let's hope the Perry report helps with her nuclear re-education.

If Congress isn't paying attention, U.S. allies are. The U.S. provides a nuclear umbrella for 30-plus countries, including several -- Japan, Germany and South Korea, for example -- capable of developing their own nuclear weapons. If they lose confidence in Washington's ability to protect them, the Perry report notes, they'll kick off a new nuclear arms race that will spread world-wide.

In a speech this fall, Mr. Gates said "there is no way we can maintain a credible deterrent" without "resorting to testing" or "pursuing a modernization program." General Kevin Chilton, the four-star in charge of U.S. strategic forces, has also spent the past year making the case for modernization. "The time to act is now," he told a Washington audience this month.

The aging U.S. nuclear arsenal is an urgent worry. A world free of nuclear weapons is a worthy goal, shared by many Presidents, including Ronald Reagan. Until that day arrives, no U.S. President can afford to let our nuclear deterrent erode.

 

Let not the facts get in the way of a convenient theory

President Bush shows some good reflexes in dealing with cranky reporter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duLds-TZMGw

I'm not getting the motive to be disingenuous here , , ,

FWIW:

By PETER BERGEN
Published: December 13, 2008
Washington


A FEW days before the presidential election, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told a group of intelligence officials that the new administration could well be tested by a terrorist attack on the homeland in its first year in office. “The World Trade Center was attacked in the first year of President Clinton, and the second attack was in the first year of President Bush,” he said.

President-elect Barack Obama made a similar observation when he told “60 Minutes” that it was important to get a national security team in place “because transition periods are potentially times of vulnerability to a terrorist attack.” During the campaign, Joe Biden warned that “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”

Should we be worried? In fact, the probability of a Qaeda attack on the United States is vanishingly small, for the same reasons that for the past seven years the terrorist group has not been able to carry out one.

President Bush and his supporters have often ascribed the absence of a Qaeda attack on the United States to the Iraq war, which supposedly acted as “flypaper” for jihadist terrorists, so instead of fighting them in Boston, America has fought them in Baghdad. Other commentators have said that Al Qaeda is simply biding its time to equal or top 9/11.

The real reasons are more prosaic. First, the American Muslim community has rejected the Qaeda ideological virus. American Muslims have instead overwhelmingly signed up for the American Dream, enjoying higher incomes and educational levels than the average.

Second, though it is hard to prove negatives, there appear to be no Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. If they do exist, they are so asleep they are comatose. True, in 2003, the F.B.I. arrested Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker who met with Qaeda leaders in Pakistan after 9/11 and then had a plot to demolish the Brooklyn Bridge with a pair of blowtorches, a deed akin to trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty with a firecracker. But he is an exceptional case. Two years after his arrest, a leaked F.B.I. report concluded, “To date, we have not identified any true ‘sleeper’ agents in the U.S.”

Third, when jihadist terrorists have attacked the United States, they have arrived from outside the country, something that is much harder to do now. The 19 hijackers of 9/11 all came from elsewhere. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center bombing, flew to New York from Pakistan. Today’s no-fly list and other protective measures make entering the country much more difficult.

Fourth, the Bush administration has made Americans safer with measures like the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center, where officials from different branches of government share information and act on terrorist threats. As a result of such measures, scores of terrorism cases have been aggressively investigated in the United States. But despite the billions of dollars invested in all these efforts and the thousands of men and women who get up every day to hunt for terrorists, the resulting cases have almost never involved concrete terrorist plots or acts.

Of the so-called terrorism cases since 9/11, many have revolved around charges of “material support” for a terrorist group, a vague concept that can encompass almost any dealings with organizations that have at one point engaged in terrorism. And in the cases where a terrorist plot has been alleged, the plans have been more aspirational than realistic.

If Al Qaeda can’t get people into the country, doesn’t have sleeper cells here and is unable to garner support from the American Muslim community, then how does it pull off an attack in the United States? While a small-bore attack may be organized by a Qaeda wannabe at some point, a catastrophic mass-casualty assault anything along the lines of 9/11 is no longer plausible.

This is not to say Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to our interests. It has of course regenerated itself on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan since 9/11, and as the 2005 attacks on the London subways and the foiled 2006 plot to bring down airliners leaving Heathrow Airport showed, it remains a grave danger to Britain.

In addition, Al Qaeda’s inability to attack the American homeland for the foreseeable future does not then mean that it can’t kill large numbers of American living overseas. If the 2006 “planes plot” had succeeded, British prosecutors say, as many as 1,500 passengers would have died, many of them Americans.

The incoming Obama administration has much to deal with, between managing two wars and the implosion of the financial system and car industry. But the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the United States in its early stages by Al Qaeda is close to zero.

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “The Osama bin Laden I Know.”

When the majority of the Muslim world decides that the struggle is between civilization and barbarism instead of between the West and Islam, then the war can be won.

Indian navy captures 23 pirates
Pirates threatened a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Aden, navy says
The Associated Press
updated 9:45 a.m. PT, Sat., Dec. 13, 2008

NEW DELHI - The Indian navy captured 23 pirates who threatened a merchant vessel Saturday in the lawless waters of the Gulf of Aden, where dozens of ships have come under attack by gunmen in recent months.

An Indian navy ship, the INS Mysore, was escorting merchant ships in the region near Somalia when it received a distress call from seamen on board the MV Gibe, who said they were being attacked by two boats.

The distress call said the pirates were firing as their boats closed in on the Gibe, according to a statement from the Indian government. The pirate boats attempted to escape when they saw the Mysore and its helicopter, but were boarded by Indian marine commandos, the statement said.

The pirates had "a substantial cache of arms and equipment," including seven AK-47 assault rifles, three machine guns, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and other weapons, the statement said. They also found a GPS receiver and other equipment.

The pirates were from Somalia and Yemen, two countries on the coast of the Gulf of Aden.

The Gibe was flying an Ethiopian flag, the statement said, but there was no further information about the ship.

Last month, India's navy drew criticism after sinking a Thai fishing trawler that had been commandeered hours earlier by pirates. At least one Thai crew member was killed in the attack, which the Indian navy had originally announced by saying it had sunk a pirate "mother ship." The Indian navy defended its actions, saying it had fired in self-defense.

Somali pirates have become increasingly brazen, and recently seized a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million of crude oil. Many of the vessels are taken to pirate-controlled regions in Somalia, where they are held for ransom.

It was not immediately clear what would happen to the pirates captured by the Indians, or where they would be taken. The statement said only that the prisoners and their weapons would be "handed over to appropriate authorities ashore."

'All necessary measures'
Most foreign navies patrolling the Somali coast have been reluctant to detain suspects because of uncertainties over where they would face trial, since Somalia has no effective central government or legal system.

An estimated 1,500 pirates are based in Somalia's semiautonomous Puntland region, raking in millions of dollars.


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present a draft Security Council resolution next week asking the United Nations to authorize "all necessary measures" against piracy from Somalia.

But on Friday, the commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land, as the draft proposes.

U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney told reporters that it is difficult to identify pirates, and the potential for killing innocent civilians "cannot be overestimated."

PJ O'Rourke had a very powerful chapter in his "Parliament of Whores" about the Dept. of Ag.    It would make sense to me to abolish the whole thing.

In Mexico, Assassins of Increasing Skill
Well-Coordinated Cartel Hits Show Greater Sophistication
 
A forensics team examines the scene of Huerta's murder. Assassins fired 85 rounds at Huerta's SUV, hitting him 40 times. No nearby vehicles were hit by stray bullets.

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 12, 2008; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121103540.html

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- The hit was fast, bold, lethal. Jesús Huerta Yedra, a top federal prosecutor here, was gunned down last week in a busy intersection 100 yards from the U.S. border in a murder of precise choreography.

In Mexico's chaotic drug war, attacks are no longer the work of desperate amateurs with bad aim. Increasingly, the killings are being carried out by professionals, often hooded and gloved, who trap their targets in coordinated ambushes, strike with overwhelming firepower, and then vanish into the afternoon rush hour -- just as they did in the Huerta killing.

The paid assassins, known as sicarios, are rarely apprehended. Mexican officials say the commando squads probably travel from state to state, across a country where the government and its security forces are drawing alarming conclusions about the scope and skill of an enemy supported by billions of dollars in drug profits.

"They are getting very good at their jobs," said Hector Hawley Morelos, coordinator of the state forensics and crime laboratory here, where criminologists and coroners have been overwhelmed by more than 1,600 homicides in Juarez this year. "The assassins show a high level of sophistication. They have had training -- somewhere. They appear to have knowledge of police investigative procedures. For instance, they don't leave fingerprints. That is very disturbing."

Alejandro Pariente, the spokesman for the attorney general in Chihuahua state, said, "They are called organized crime for a very good reason. Because they are very organized."

In Ciudad Juarez, a tough industrial city across the river from El Paso, where 42 people have been killed in the last week, the morgue serves as a grim classroom for the study of drug violence along the border.

In an interview last week, a busy coroner in the forensics lab spoke while performing an autopsy. A dozen dead men awaited final exams, sprawled on metal tables, their bodies pebbled with fat bullet holes, open eyes staring at fluorescent bulbs. The men were all eventually classified as "organized crime" homicides, which account for the majority of deaths in Ciudad Juarez, the most violent city in Mexico.


On Monday, federal Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said there have been 5,376 drug-related killings this year in Mexico, double last year's number. Later that evening, Victor Hugo Moneda, who led Mexico City's investigative police agency, was killed in an ambush as he was exiting his car at his home in the capital. The assailants, using a car and motorcycle, fired 22 shots, according to police.

In the Juarez morgue, the three walk-in freezers are filled to capacity with more than 90 corpses, stacked floor to ceiling, in leaking white bags with zippers. After a few months, those who are not identified are buried in a field at the city cemetery at the edge of the desert.

"The patterns that we often see with organized crime homicides are high-caliber weapons, multiple wounds, extreme trauma," said Alma Rosa Padilla, a chief medical examiner, who completes as many as five full autopsies each day. "They don't go to the hospital."

One U.S. anti-drug law enforcement officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he works in Mexico, said, "The Mexican army has had a problem with deserters. So have the police, including special anti-crime units. They are now working for the other side."

More than a dozen top Mexican law enforcement officials have been detained recently for allegedly working for the drug cartels, including Noé Ramírez Mandujano, the nation's former top anti-drug prosecutor. He was arrested last month on suspicion of accepting $450,000 in exchange for sharing intelligence with traffickers.
===============

In Mexico, Assassins of Increasing Skill
 


According to information released Thursday by the Mexican congress, more than 18,000 soldiers have deserted the Mexican army this year. In the last three years, 177 members of special-forces units have abandoned their posts, and many went to work for organized crime.

Recently, Chihuahua Gov. José Reyes Baeza said that hired gunmen who have been arrested confessed that they carried out executions for 1,000 pesos per killing, about $75.

Weapons pour over the border here from Texas, bought illegally from street gangs or legally at sporting goods stores in the United States. Last month, the Mexican army made the largest seizure of illegal firearms and military-type weapons in more than two decades, uncovering a cache of 540 rifles, 165 grenades and 500,000 rounds of ammunition in a house in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Tex.

According to Mexican officials, rifles stolen from Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army post in El Paso, end up on the streets of Juarez. At the forensic laboratory, the ballistics team pulled out a dozen weapons, including AK-47s, AR-15s, M-16s and other military-grade arms.

"I think that the government is simply overwhelmed. The cases are coming in fives and tens now, and it is probably very hard to keep up," said Tony Payan, an expert on the drug trade and professor at the University of Texas in El Paso. "The government is on the defensive. The thugs have the upper hand here. They probably perfect their techniques faster than the government can find the experts or the resources to combat them."

Huerta's murder was a bold strike. He was the second-ranking federal prosecutor in the state. Recently, the 40-year-old lawyer was handed the case of slain journalist Armando Rodríguez, a veteran police reporter at El Diario newspaper who was killed by a gunman in front of his house last month in Ciudad Juarez. The reasons behind Huerta's killing remain unknown.

When forensic investigator David García and his partner arrived in their white van 15 minutes after the shooting on the afternoon of Dec. 3, the municipal police were marking the perimeter of the crime scene with yellow tape and the first soldiers were arriving to stand guard.


The sunny, broad intersection of Arizona Street and Boulevard Pope John Paul II abuts the Rio Grande and is a five-minute drive from a main bridge into El Paso. Easily visible across the river was a picket line of U.S. Border Patrol vehicles.

Huerta was riding in the passenger seat of a new silver-colored Dodge Journey SUV with Texas plates, which had stopped at a red light. The car was driven by a secretary at the prosecutor's office, Marisela Esparza Granados. When García arrived, the splintered windshield wipers on the vehicle were still struggling to operate.

The intersection around the Dodge was littered with spent shells. García and his partner, who carry clipboards but no weapons, methodically photographed the scene and collected 85 casings, all in the caliber consistent with the account some witnesses told police -- that two hooded men from two vans pulled in front of the Dodge and opened fire with AK-47s.

The criminologists at the forensic lab were struck by several details. First, they suspected that Huerta was followed by at least one, and perhaps several, chase vehicles, which would have helped the gunmen get into position to ambush Huerta. They knew the car Huerta would use and his route, the investigators said.

Second, the criminologists were impressed with the precision, speed and audacity of the attack.

When it rolled to a stop at the traffic light, Huerta's vehicle was surrounded by other cars at a crowded intersection. But no other vehicles were hit by stray bullets. Later, Hawley, the lab coordinator, pointed out the tight pattern of gunfire pocking the SUV's windshield.

"You see they hit where they aim. He was the target. Not her," Hawley said. The assassins concentrated their fire directly at Huerta, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest. "If they know they're wearing a bulletproof vest, they ignore the chest and shoot the head," he added.

The autopsy revealed that Huerta had been struck at least 40 times, most in the chest. The passenger seat of the SUV was soaked with blood. The secretary, Esparza, was struck only three times, though a neck wound was fatal.

In the crime laboratory, the shell casings were examined by the ballistics team and recorded. The bullets are almost always from the United States. The assassins do not trust bullets made in Mexico, Hawley said, adding, "The American bullets are better."

The bipartisan vote in support of the report would seem to give it considerable weight.  Any comments?  GM?

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf

Profiles of Valor: 3rd Special Forces Group
On 6 April 2008, in the mountains of Afghanistan's Nuristan province, a battle erupted between a team of 12 Special Forces troops from Operational Detachment Alpha 3336, a few dozen Afghan allies and hundreds of jihadis. The soldiers had jumped from helicopters at daybreak onto a mountain covered in ice, attempting to gain the high ground on a terrorist stronghold in the Shok Valley. Their mission: To capture or kill members of the militant group Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG). But insurgents quickly took positions against the U.S. troops -- and the insurgents had the high ground. Staff Sgt. Luis Morales saw an insurgent and opened fire, killing him, but enemy fighters then began firing on U.S. and Afghan troops from practically every direction. Because there was only one way up the valley, the jihadis "were able to wait until we were in the most vulnerable position to initiate the ambush," said Staff Sgt. Seth Howard. Several soldiers were hit in the opening barrage, but they all fought back. "We were pretty much in the open, there were no trees to hide behind," said Morales, who helped pull Staff Sgt. Dillon Behr, shot in the hip, back to a safer position. Morales himself had been shot in the thigh and ankle.

For the next seven hours, the small contingent of U.S. and Afghan troops fought hard while pinned to the side of the mountain, and managed to get down the mountain without being overwhelmed only when Air Force jets bombarded the insurgent positions with 2,000-pound bombs. The soldiers who could walk carried those who couldn't, including Staff Sgt. John Wayne Walding, who was hit by a bullet that according to Master Sgt. Scott Ford, the team sergeant, "basically amputated his right leg right there on the battlefield."

A helicopter attempted to land and evacuate the soldiers, but took several rounds in the rotor and hovered just long enough for the medic to jump off. A second helicopter then landed in an icy stream nearby and collected the troops. Among the Americans and Afghans, there were 15 wounded and two killed, both Afghans, while 150 to 200 jihadis were killed. The Green Berets were nearly out of ammunition, too -- each one had two magazines left. Today, 10 of those soldiers from Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group will receive the Silver Star for their heroism. It will be the highest such number given to elite troops for a single battle since the Vietnam War. (For more details of the battle, see The Washington Post's account.)

China's democracy movement has moved in fits and starts since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But a manifesto issued this week marks a brave new chapter in the fight for political freedom.

More than 400 Chinese citizens living inside China published "Charter 08" on the Internet. The document calls for a new constitution to establish multiparty democracy and includes a scathing account of Communist rule. It describes its ambition for a political system in which the military, courts, schools and churches are accountable to the constitution rather than to a political party.

In a year that has seen a crackdown on political dissent, especially during the Olympics and March Tibet protests, this is a bold step, and the authors don't mince words: "Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises." It continues: "[A]s the ruling elite continues with impunity to crush and to strip away the rights of citizens to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness, we see the powerless in our society . . . becoming more militant and raising the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions. The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional."

An introduction to the charter by American Sinologist Perry Link -- who translated it into English -- likens it to Charter 77, the document signed by Vaclav Havel and other Czechoslovakian dissidents in 1977. Like those dissidents, two signers of Charter 08 were detained by police this week and about a dozen have been questioned, according to Amnesty International.

The Czech dissidents waited 13 years to realize their democratic dream. In China, the reality of self-government also seems far off and Charter 08 won't produce immediate change. But the boldness and bravery of its statement suggest that the democrats' day will come.