Secrecy News for 06/14/05: "A scientific paper discussing the possibility of a terrorist attack on the U.S. milk supply was scheduled for publication in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last month until the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) intervened, calling it a 'road map for terrorists,' and asked the journal to withdraw the paper. In response to the HHS objections, PNAS agreed to delay publication for an indefinite period.

But some scientists who have reviewed the paper say it should be rebutted rather than censored, since it is based on a series of alarmist assumptions that are objectively unsupported."

(Via Secrecy News.)

The Downing Street Memos: "The memos indeed show us nothing new. Simply from President Bush’s body language and obvious impatience in the summer of 2002, not to mention Vice-President Cheney’s dissing of Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors, I figured that they all had made up their minds for war. So it’s not surprising to see a meeting of the British government at that time trying to come to terms with what their large Atlantic brother was preparing to do.

The memos themselves give few specifics in terms of the exact words of one player or another, but taken together they show a clear pattern of fixing the intelligence (yes, as in fixing an election), developing ploys to justify attacking Iraq, and a lack of planning for what the war might yield.

The memos are the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers: not so voluminous, but definitive. Some brave (or fed-up) soul in the higher reaches of the British government is taking a tremendous risk to tell us the truth, not unlike Mark Felt, who played it differently than Daniel Ellsberg."

(Via WhirledView.)

Do We Live in a Free Country?: "Do we live in a free country? According to President Bush: 'Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.' "

(Via LewRockwell.com Blog.)

Remember this?...: "Air Force One records subpoenaed in CIA leak probe/March 6, 2004

The grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name subpoenaed a wide range of White House documents, including records of telephone calls from Air Force One and information relating to an internal working group dealing with Iraq, government sources confirmed to CNN on Friday."

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

The Guantanamo Hilton: "Veep Dick Cheney describes the Guantanamo detention center as if it were a state-of-the-art resort hotel—on the American Plan, of course.

Yes, guests are forced to take the meals along with the lodging, but this is a good thing, Cheney notes. Detainees aren’t gaunt and scrawny-looking like their relatives back in those poverty-stricken native villages. Lucky detainees!

Cheney talks about comfort, too. He rhapsodizes about the hot and cold running water, the showers the detainees might not have in their own homes.

Pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the sheets’ thread count."

(Via WhirledView.)

Sustaining the Nuclear Enterprise - A New Approach [1]: "Two weeks ago, John Fleck at the Albuquerque Journal reported (subscription only) that the nuclear weapons labs are lining up behind a plan to scrap the curent ‘Stockpile Stewardship Program’ developed to maintain US nuclear weapons without testing:

The United States’ current approach to maintaining its nuclear arsenal ‘looks increasingly unsustainable,’ according to an internal report by senior officials at the nation’s three nuclear weapons labs.

The nuclear weapons program’s future costs exceed the available budget, and the effort to maintain aging warheads is forcing the nation to retain a larger nuclear arsenal than would otherwise be needed, the report concludes."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

More on the Stealth Speedboat: "Commenter Murc points out that the stealth speedboat noted last Friday is most likely a SEALION (SEAL Insertion, Observation, Neutralization) technology demonstrator. While not planned to enter full-scale production, the first SEALION has been in testing for some time and a second will be delivered later this year.As a technology demonstrator, SEALION I is not armed but is designed accept a variety of modular mission payloads and could accept a modular weapons system, according to program officials"

(Via Defense Tech.)

Salon.com News | U.S., Italy to discuss CIA kidnapping case: "Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Friday the U.S. ambassador expressed Washington's ''full and total' respect for Italian sovereignty at a meeting about the kidnapping of a radical Egyptian cleric that has resulted in an arrest warrant for 13 purported CIA operatives.

Ambassador Mel Sembler spent about an hour in Berlusconi's office after having been summoned there a day earlier. Afterward, Berlusconi issued a statement saying he had expressed the ''indispensable need' for the United States to ''fully respect Italian sovereignty.'"

...

"On Thursday, Cabinet minister Carlo Giovanardi denied in parliament that Italian officials had any prior knowledge of the Feb. 17, 2003, kidnapping of the cleric in Milan. The Italian arrest warrant for the 13 CIA operatives says the cleric was sent to Egypt and tortured.

The Egyptian purportedly was seized as part of a CIA's practice known as ''rendition," in which suspected terrorists are transferred without court approval to third countries, where they face interrogation and possible torture.

The incident has strained relations between the two allies, already tested by the shooting death of an Italian agent by U.S. troops in Baghdad in March."

(Via Salon.)

Schneier on Security: Diebold Opti-Scan Voting Machine: "Two programmers can become a lone programmer, says Hursti, who has figured out a way to control the entire central tabulator by way of a single memory card swap, and also how to make tampered polling place tapes match tampered central tabulator results. This more complex approach is untested, but based on testing performed May 26, Hursti says he has absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Three memory card tests demonstrated successful manipulation of election results, and showed that 1990 and 2002 FEC-required safeguards are being violated in the Diebold version 1.94 opti-scan system."

(Via Schneier on Security.)

Baghdad Burning: "9/11 and the dubious connection with Iraq came up within less than a minute of the beginning of the speech. The cousin wondered whether anyone in America still believed Iraq had anything to do with September 11.

Bush said:
‘The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. The war reached our shores on September 11, 2001.’

Do people really still believe this? In spite of that fact that no WMD were found in Iraq, in spite of the fact that prior to the war, no American was ever killed in Iraq and now almost 2000 are dead on Iraqi soil? It’s difficult to comprehend that rational people, after all of this, still actually accept the claims of a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Or that they could actually believe Iraq is less of a threat today than it was in 2003."

...

Bush said:
“We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who exploded car bombs along a busy shopping street in Baghdad, including one outside a mosque. We see the nature of the enemy in terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul...”

Yes. And Bush is extremely concerned with the mosques. He might ask the occupation forces in Iraq to quit attacking mosques and detaining the worshipers inside- to stop raiding them and bombing them and using them as shelters for American snipers in places like Falluja and Samarra. And the terrorists who sent a suicide bomber to a teaching hospital in Mosul? Maybe they got their cue from the American troops who attacked the only functioning hospital in Falluja.

(Via Baghdad Burning.)

Salon.com News | Supreme Court won't hear CIA leak case: "Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller, who filed the appeals, face up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal sources as part of an investigation into who divulged the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

...

The ruling effectively ends Cooper and Miller's appeal on free-speech grounds, although Time said in a statement it would seek a new hearing in federal court on other grounds.

Plame's name was first made public in 2003 by columnist Robert Novak, who cited unidentified senior Bush administration officials for the information. The column appeared after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a newspaper opinion piece criticizing the Bush administration's claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.

Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime and a government investigation is in its second year. No charges have been brought."

(Via Salon.)

U.S., Britain led massive secret bombing campaign | AfterDowningStreet.org: "A U.S. general who commanded the U.S. allied air forces in Iraq has confirmed that the U.S. and Britain conducted a massive secret bombing campaign before the U.S. actually declared war on Iraq.

The quote, passed from RAW STORY to the London Sunday Times last week, raises troubling questions of whether President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair engaged in an illegal war before seeking a UN resolution or congressional approval.

While the Downing Street documents collectively raise disturbing questions about how the Bush administration led the United States into Iraq, including allegations that ‘intelligence was being fixed,’ other questions have emerged about when the US and British led allies actually began the Iraq war."

(Via AfterDowningStreet.org.)

Salon.com News | DOE to resume production of plutonium-238: "The Energy Department is moving to resume production of plutonium-238 as an energy source for spacecraft and some national security activities, because existing supplies will be virtually gone in five years.

The department said a decision on production of plutonium-238, reaffirmed last year, 'will not be revisited' and that production activities should be consolidated at the government's Idaho National Laboratory to increase security."

"Plutonium-238 is not used for nuclear weapons, but its steady, virtually infinite release of heat during decay makes the isotope valuable as a heat source to produce electricity in spacecraft and for some satellites that are unable to rely on the sun as an energy source. It is many times more radioactive than weapons-grade plutonium-239, however, and ingesting a speck can be fatal."

(Via Salon.)