Author: Jason Ditz

Getting to the top of a Congressional committee with foreign policy implications is reserved mostly for the lunatic hawks, and Congressmen who are reasonable are usually anonymous.

But maybe a little less anonymous today, after 118 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter calling for talks with incoming Iranian President Hassan Rohani.

That’s not going to sit well with the Israel Lobby, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already made it clear that the he wants the US to treat Rohani with hostility, and the Obama Administration has already suggested that’s the path they’re going with.

Making a deal is easy, and under Ahmadinejad, the US had a ready-made excuse to not make good deals with Iran, one that they exercised repeatedly when deals seemed close. With Rohani taking over and 118 members of Congress on board, not making a deal will be all the more difficult.

Let’s dissect a headline:

Pentagon: Iran will soon have nuclear missiles capable of striking US

Here’s the true parts:

1. Iran is a country that exists
2. The Pentagon is a place that says lots of nonsensical things

If we’re realistic about examining the “threat” of Iran nuking the US in two short years, there are a starling array of things worth noting. The one that struck me though is that Iran has been “within X years” where X is 2-4 depending on how hawkish the person claiming it is, from nuking the US for as long as I can remember.

That’s not hyperbole. People in the US literally began making these dire predictions in the early 1980’s, when I was just learning to read and before I’d started grade school. 30+ years later, the predictions are still coming, and they’re still headline news.

The claim stems from two different assumptions:

a) Iran will have mastered making warhead-capable miniaturized nuclear bombs.

b) Iran will have developed ICBMs capable of hitting the US.

Part a) is just embarrassing nonsense, because even America’s own intelligence estimates say Iran hasn’t even been trying to do anything nuclear weapons related in years, and the IAEA keeps reiterating the civilian nature of Iran’s civilian program. We go through this all the time. The b) part I think is more interesting, because Iran actually has missiles, and is trying to improve those missiles.

But here the claim fails too, because Iran’s developments in missile technology have centered almost entirely on the twin disciplines of anti-aircraft missiles to protect themselves against air strikes, and medium-range missiles that max out at about Israel (or Greece for the “Iran’s going to attack Europe” scaremongering).

Every assessment of Iran’s military includes the same word in the conclusion: defensive. Iran can’t have a US-sized military budget, so it focuses primarily on making attack inconvenient and having a credible retaliatory capability in the hopes of convincing Israel or whoever that attacking is too dangerous.

And let’s be honest about the “or whoever” part of that. If Iran gets attacked, it’s going to be by Israel, because they’ve got the unique brand of proactive sociopaths in leadership to start a big war like that for no good reason, while most other nations have a whole other brand of sociopaths in power that are lazy and reluctant to start any war they don’t think they’ll win in a matter of hours.

Usually one needs a hypothetical to make a point this clearly and strongly.

Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Newspaper, the privately-owned newspaper of the nation’s former ruling party, has found itself completely out of luck today when they found out that the printing press, owned by the Egyptian government (now a military junta after yesterday’s coup) is no longer available for use.

Even a nominally free press cannot be one if the government owns the printing press. And while that may sound ridiculously low-tech to us these days, lets not forget the US government’s efforts to gain more and more official control over the Internet, nominally for national security reasons.

The Internet is increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, and it serves as a lot of things including, obviously, a printing press. Giving the US government, or indeed any government, serious control over the Internet means we no longer own the printing press, and our ideas never need to be officially censored at all, just kept quietly off the presses.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made no bones about his view of Twitter as a threat to his regime, dubbing it a “danger to society.” Other officials in his government ruled Twitter “deadlier than car bombs.”

Twitter sure could make some Turkish officials angry, but since the company has no presence in Turkey there is literally nothing that Erdogan could do. He’s hoping to change that.

Turkey’s Communications Minister Binali Yildrim is calling on Twitter to open an office somewhere in Turkey so that the next time they get mad at them they can go someplace inside Turkey to do something about it.

Needless to say, Twitter is seen as unlikely to open an office in Turkey just so they employees can be threatened face-to-face next time Erdogan gets mad.

“I really don’t know who WikiLeaks are, other than this Assange person.”
– NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander

If you read through the transcript of NSA Director Keith Alexander’s appearance on ABC this morning, you’re mostly reading deliberately ambiguous nonsense and overt lies, with the uniting theme being things that, if taken at face value, would please a voting majority of Congress.

Except when Gen. Alexander was asked about whether he thought WikiLeaks was real journalism or not. This question has long fascinated the state-endorsed media in America, and there are two ways Alexander could’ve plausibly gone, either insisting WikiLeaks was, as Congressmen so often say, a villainous den of data-thieves, or he could’ve dodged the question by saying, quite correctly, that who is and isn’t a “real” journalist isn’t up to the NSA. Instead we get the above quote, which suggests Alexander has barely even heard the word “WikiLeaks,” other than it being the name of the evil gerbil on South Park or something.

He didn’t just plead ignorance, he pled shocking, implausible ignorance. The titular head of the largest planetary surveillance system in the history of mankind, the guy whose agency reads all our email, has data on every phone call, etc. has never even looked cursorily into WikiLeaks, a huge global clearinghouse of leaked classified information. That’s not the “least untruthful” kind of lie we come to expect from this administration, it’s not even a reasonable lie.

Then again, what if it’s the truth?

As unreasonable as it sounds, suppose Gen. Alexander is just shockingly bad at his job, and knows less about information gathering than your average high-schooler. Suppose the person sitting in this seat of unfathomable, uncheckable power at the dawn of the information age is just a grossly incompetent buffoon who, as is so often in government bureaucracies, failed upward until he found himself at the top.

That shred of hope is sure going to make me sleep a little better at night.

The White House petition calling for President Obama to immediately and unconditionally pardon Edward Snowden for informing the American public about the NSA’s surveillance schemes has reached its goal of 100,000 signatures today, and in less than two weeks.

The petition system normally gives you a whole month to get the signatures you need, and will oblige President Obama to at least make his position on Snowden’s prosecution public.

In the past President Obama has said we “welcomes” the public discussion on the abusive surveillance of everyday Americans, and such a discussion would’ve been impossible if Snowden hadn’t informed us about what the NSA was doing. A pardon seems like the least he could do.

Now just because the petition has reached its goal doesn’t mean more signatures aren’t welcome. More signatures means a higher profile for this issue, and that’s always a good thing.