Author: brittblaser

An interesting question is whether any government employees at any level believe they are rulers rather than mere employees.

The next question is whether We the People are willing to put up with those kind of employees.

Or should we ask such questions of people who decide, globally, who dies to advance our national interest?

Or whether the mainstream press should report such things?

The next question is whether we believe that there are people in our government who are capable of killing others to protect their political interests. Our presence in Iraq suggests the answer. The administration’s willingness to withdraw hastily before the election is another answer.

Or whether the press would kill such a delicious story to protect publishers’ interests.

The following article wonders how a State Department intelligence expert in the bureau involved with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction does the following:

1. Falls head down into a 20-foot deep window well…
2. Although he has no authorized access to a windowed area or the roof…
3. Without his suit coat or shoes…
4. While his wife is waiting for him in the parking garage…
5. Reported by a former US Naval officer and intelligence analyst.

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MYSTERY SURROUNDS DEATH

OF STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL

by Wayne Madsen
(special to From The Wilderness)

© Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

November 20, 2003 (FTW), WASHINGTON — In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal’s death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media.

Interestingly, the FOX report states that State Department officials confirmed Kokal’s death to The Washington Post yet the Post – according to an archive search – has published nothing at all about Kokal’s death. A subsequent search revealed that the Post had made a short three-paragraph entry the death in the Metro section on November 7,  2003. However, the Post entry stated that Kokal did not work in intelligence and the story does not show up in the archives.

Kokal’s INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived in Arlington, Virginia.

However, a colleague of Kokal’s told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over “problems” with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself out in such a manner so that he would “land on his head.” At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks.

State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser. Kokal’s former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former intelligence agents with the CIA or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.

INR and other State Department officials report that a “chill” has set in at the State Department following Kokal’s defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal.

(Wayne Madsen, a frequent FTW contributor, is a former US Naval officer and intelligence analyst who is currently an author, freelance writer and commentator in Washington, D.C.)

12:51:33 PM    

Halley comments this morning that most Democrats are waiting on the sidelines but are committed to voting for someone who is “electable.”

“Electable

Is it even a word? I hear it everywhere I go from every undecided Democrat I meet.

“We’ll go with whoever’s the most electable.”

Isn’t it time to stop holding back, and by stepping up to it, MAKE one of these guys electable?

I’m on both sides of Halley’s fence. One of the reasons I pitched my tent in the Dean camp is precisely because he’s so electable. However, my suggestion last June was the one Halley makes:

Sleepers Awake!

Tomorrow afternoon will be election day 2004. What will we have done to end the madness in Washington?…

Kingmakers Awake!

This is a time for leadership and not waffling, a time to pick a horse and not worry about picking the wrong one. This may also prove to be the time when Internet opinion leaders became the kingmakers in our society in the same sense that past kingmakers have been, by turns, the robber barons, the Hearsts, the Sarnoffs and currently the Murdochs.

The question is, will we collectively act or shall we keep discussing best practices?

It continues to be clear to me. Pick the candidate who’s not unelectable and with whom you have the most influence. Do we need a long conversation to determine which candidate is most open to blogger/bloggee input?

If there’s a secret to building this alliance, it would be confidence–we could just do it. We need to feel as confident in an imminent blog-based White House as Jeff Bezos was in selling books on line. This delicious sense of burying the kleptocracy under a blizzard of votes and small contributions is the most democratic upheaval we can imagine. But who is we?

We have met the Enemy and He is Us* “Herein can be found that rare native tree, the Presidential Timber, struck down in mid-sprout by the jawbone of a politician. “Pogo returns to the swamp from a couple of political conventions to find his unfinished business being rapidly finished, once and for all, by rough and ready hands.”       –From the foreword to The Pogo Papers, 1952-53 *One of my father’s favorite quotes. He worked hard for Dwight Eisenhower, who almost ran as a Democrat. My father felt that Ike saved the Republicans from staying in the pocket of the ultra-conservative Robert Taft of Ohio.

“In the time of Joseph McCarthyism, celebrated in the Pogo strip by a character named Simple J. Malarkey, I attempted to explain each individual is wholly involved in the democratic process, work at it or no. The results of the  process fall on the head of the public and he who is recalcitrant or procrastinates in raising his voice can blame no one but himself.”
                   —Walt Kelley, 1982

No one would argue against the point that, if a couple of million people put up $100 each, Dean’s coattails would carry a lot of congressional seats. With 2 million contributors, the total would probably be more like half a billion bucks.

Reaching Critical Mass

Few of us are persuaded by Mr. Kelley’s argument. In our oversaturated age, it’s impossible to separate the mass of compelling but fraudulent messages from the truly stunning truth when it unexpectedly shows up. You’d think that by now I would have had all my friends sign up at the Dean site and put up their $10-100.

Until I do that, maybe I’ll quit bitching about how passive others are.

10:38:04 PM    

This post will make the most sense for those who have witnessed war and are not freaked out by the cold calculus of accepting death as a constant and the loss of buddies as gut-stirring but as inevitable as taxes. Most of the rest of the world has been forced to experience war first hand. Perhaps that’s why the rest of the world is unimpressed with this administration’s gung-ho attitude, so typical of raw recruits and so uncharacteristic of adults who’ve peered into the abyss and lived to describe it:

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
                             – Dwight D. Eisenhower

I hate to diss fellow bloggers, but the warbloggers seem to have a paucity of combat experience. We would never entertain the views of programmers who’ve never hacked code, or historians who’ve never read history. Why would we listen carefully to warbloggers who’ve never watched tracers arcing toward their position?

Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool’s paradise. The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way out of the terrorist threat. It’s entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel–a kind of adolescent road rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. “There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots.“

The warbloggers’ broad lack of combat experience is so obvious a disqualifier that I apologize for not pointing out this disconnect last winter.

The Bush Administration dismissed European caution last winter as a malady of “Old Europe,” as if cultures which include Dresden and Hiroshima bring nothing to the dialogue. Reflecting on this, and the consistent disapproval of our unilateral course, emanating from the lands that all of us hail from, I wonder what the people of those cultures might bring to our current election cycle.

Second Hand Smoke

It must be frustrating to be a rational non-American. One suffers from a kind of secondhand smoke, a victim of behavior you can’t stop. Or like a neighbor to an appealing but uncontrollable, rowdy and violent adolescent.

While non-Americans can’t vote, I know many feel the same urgency so many of us do, and may be even more anxious to help, their energies otherwise constrained. Aid and assistance from non-Americans can be galvanizing to the conscientious objectors to unilateralism, who often feel cut off from informed discourse and often seem numbed by what has happened.

In addition to tech support and assistance, here are some projects that anyone in the second superpower can contribute to:

Fact collections

Who, when, what, where, why, with attribution. A fact is simply what an authoritative source reported. True authority is part of the research, including background like how Rev. Sun Myung Moon set up the Washington Times to look like a legitimate newspaper, or Murdoch’s Fox News.

Though conservatives seem fact-averse, a year of unfolding revelations might help some see the breadth and depth of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that people laughed at when Hillary labeled it, but now has been well documented.

Armed with the right sets of facts, someone could build a series of timelines, contrasting spin vs. reality. I imagine these to be a vertical web page, a very long table, with a center column being the solid timeline, presumably just a background color, with links among the discrete areas reported. Others will think of better ways to do this.

The Virtual Anti-Spin Room

Properly organized, these “facts” can also be a resource for people watching a Presidential debate or Fox News. A researcher could constantly “push” fact-based web pages which the viewers could compare with what is being said. Debates are now accompanied by “Spin Rooms” of partisans, so we should build a virtual non-spin room. They could also be archived as a post event video with interleaved sound bites vs. facts.

A pressing project is to give a voice to people who feel disconnected from each other. We need to expose our best thinking, starting with individual blogs. Because the campaign issues are reasonably clear-cut, a straightforward taxonomy is available to form the basis of a knowledge aggregator. That capability could persist after the election to inject fact-based opinion into the American political dialogue. Technorati has some enabling technology for this purpose.

Finally, there may be entrepreneurial opportunities. If we are serious about building extramural governance tools, enterprises must be formed using the pool of passionate, under-employed American techies. These activities may be as important to our democracy as voting-machine companies but more resonant with the Constitution and good practice.

There are better ideas than these. Whatever we do, we must overwhelm the contrived urgency of the war on terror with our own passion and intensity. Many Americans feel these are extraordinary times requiring unprecedented actions. They are right, but the actions are not a crusade against disenfranchised Muslims.

We need a global convergence of knowledge and novel economic tools, obviously Net-based, that lead the world out of its nearsightedness toward the common destiny we all understand but which politicians choose not to give voice to.

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
                             – Dwight D. Eisenhower

11:58:10 PM    

My good buddy Josh has some sound advice for us:

Reclaim the dignity of your own experience.

It’s an MP3 verbal assault on mediocrity that will make you think more than our culture usually requires.

10:50:02 PM    

Amy Harmon called tonight doing early research for an article, seeking a deeper insight into the Dean campaign. Amy’s beat at the New York Times is technology and culture, and we laughed as it occurred to us that nothing integrates tech and culture better than the Dean campaign.

Consider with me the deepest, most satisfying theme that might help us define the Dean phenomenon. It would have to be the resilient message of what American democracy means to its people. Like Robert Pirsig’s discovery about excellence, we all seem to understand the core of American freedom without needing a detailed definition.

In every age, we Americans suffer the current compromises of our freedoms, in confidence that they are merely clouds obscuring the imminent sun we hold as our birthright. We are cynics and innocents, mistrusting our politicians while assuming that they seek the same sunlight we do. What is the core of the Founders’ beliefs, and what core values do we hold so dear that our leaders trespass upon them at their peril?

The Founders’ breakthrough was their audacious assertion, which they held to be self evident, that the people collectively are more important than their rulers. This had never been stated before, and it was such a powerful idea that it inspired the French to come to our aid with a zeal in excess of their hatred of the English. (There’s a fabriqué en France statue on a little island four miles south of here, testifying to that belief and the support the French gave us in the 1770’s, without which we would not have won our freedom.)

This notion of popular sovereignty is a product of the Age of Enlightenment, that flowering of humanist rationality and idealism arising in the 17th-18th centuries. I’ve suggested before that this enlightenment grew out of two catalysts.

One was the importation of tea and coffee, awakening Europe from a centuries-long, alcohol-induced slumber. They weren’t a bunch of alkies on purpose. For centuries, the water hadn’t been safe in Europe unless it was boiled or distilled. The arrival of caffeine caused a cultural buzz that Madison Avenue can only dream of. Coffee houses sheltered radical thinking, as the interesting ferment moved from the distilleries to the conversations.

The second catalyst was the local newsletter. Printing had finally evolved from Gutenberg’s ponderous wood and leather-bound church bibles, one to each village church like the hand crafted and illuminated manuscripts they replaced (bible being Latin for “book”). An intermediate forebear of the newsletter had been the handy saddlebag-sized pocket books produced by Gustavus Aldus. They were bibles at first and then, slowly, became works of philosophy and fiction. Only in the 17th and 18th centuries were inexpensive printing presses produced that an ordinary tradesman might procure and with which he might produce a little broadsheet saying whatever he felt like saying. It was a galvanizing and outrageous freedom, transforming the printer as much as his readers.

Those cheap presses were the blog firmware of the eighteenth century, freeing voices from the hollow cadence of church and state, training the newly literate masses in clues never uttered before. For the first time, historic rites of succession were questioned, wondering what was, exactly, the divine right of thugs.

All of this had been going on at the same time as the settling of the New World, when a family might see a penniless son go off on a ship and return a millionaire, beneficiary of slavery and plunder and land seized from American aborigines (those marvelous British country mansions were won the hard way). It was a precursor to the Internet boom, when anything was possible and the old rules seemed less binding than they had been for centuries.

And then, in the New World, came a bandwidth revolution. Each of the colonies had started as settlements, divided from each other by an impassable barrier of wilderness. Their communications architecture was hub and spoke, a hierarchical command economy driven by old world masters who were the only source of the manufactured goods they needed to hack out a living from the forest. With time came expansion and roads and inter-colony trade and local foundries and mills and a slow realization that a very nice living could be had without reference to the masters now so far away. Physical distance was a metaphor for the attenuation of hierarchical control, and a clue that this newly flat society was giving more than it was getting.

The metaphors with our age are stunning and inspire us to pick up that old thread the Founders started and Emerson continued and Thoreau and Whitman and Clemens and Steinbeck and Kerouac and all the rest. We’ve been so busy lately that we’ve quit talking about ways while focused on means. But that hasn’t dimmed our collective sense of how we’re meant to live. To paraphrase what the rustic said about art, we may not know freedom, but we know what we like.

Somehow the Dean campaign dropped a little of this latent genetic sensibility into the nutrient pool called the Internet. Contrasted to an assault on freedom as we like it and a radical foray into preemptive war, we seem to sense an unprecedented disturbance in our collective force, as if a sister blue-green planet had been obliterated far, far away.

If there’s a larger meaning to the Dean phenomenon, that is it. Call me an idealist (please), but the character of people’s response counts as much as its quantity, at least in the early going. Consider the code produced by a few hackers at the open source conference in Philadelphia in 1776. Relative to the population of the colonies, there were fewer of them than there are Deaniacs among us. They haggled over it, signed it with a flourish, and let the power of their words carry the day.

If I had to pick a theme for the Dean phenomenon, that would be it.

3:25:10 AM    

…of this election cycle is the Internet. Suppose for a moment that we’re able to get past our sturm und drang that says that the fascist NeoCons are going to sell our republic out to the Republicans and that the pinko commie fag liberals will sell our democracy to the Democrats. What would our government look like if it were as customer-centric as Amazon?

I’ve been discussing the idea of e-democracy today with Doc Searls and Phil Windley who are having dinner in Las Vegas on the topic as I write this. (I told Phil I wish I could be a fly in his soup). Our collective assessment is that no one is thinking about e-democracy on a large enough scale.

Everybody wants smaller government except the government. Everybody wants government to have a better User Interface. Everybody wants the government to be as user-friendly as Amazon. Everybody wants transparency everywhere in government: voting auditability, legislation, cloak room deal-cutting, pork, contracting, etc. And we all want the cost of government to drop like ISP pricing.

And no one wants politicians getting in the way of governance any more. At some level, we know this is possible and inevitable. But should we have to wait a couple of decades for our overdue upgrade?

Phil observes an interesting latency factor built in to government: governments resist all management principles for 20 years after they’ve been widely accepted in private enterprise. He says that if you announce in a company that 20% of the people are going to be let go, everyone assumes that it will be someone else, thanks to their high opinion of their value to the enterprise. Apparently, though, if you make that announcement in government, everyone assumes they’ll be part of the 20%. He’s describing a culture founded on a sense of fraudulence.

I’ll bet that most of us have a similar vision of e-government. Once you describe government as a web app, the rest is mostly details. All fifteen of us could sit down and sketch it out on a couple of flip chart sheets. But to implement it, we need to cajole the bureaucrats out of their bureaus.

Phil and I are willing to stipulate a couple of points:

1. Many, maybe most of government employees could be replaced by a well-designed web app.
2. The big cost of government is not the payroll, but the programs that bureaucrats dream up to justify their job/program/department.
3. If only the bureaucrats would cooperate, an IT SWAT Team could design that web app in #1.

Here’s the secret to breaking the civil service log jam: Establish a program under which a cooperative civil servant can qualify for reasonable merit raises and retirement on the pension they’re aiming at, if they’ll just go home and stop causing trouble. First they need to cooperate with the SWAT Team to manage the paperwork they currently handle. If they can demonstrate that they really don’t do anything, they get a bonus, since it saves everyone so much trouble.

You say Republican and I say Democrat

With a proper UI and scalability, does anyone care what servers are behind the scenes at Amazon? Isn’t it the same with e-government? If the systems run properly, the party in power doesn’t matter as much. Citizens should be discussing the fine points of services and decision-making rather than Dem vs. GOP. It’s a granularity issue: the finer the grain, the more useful the design discussions.

When the citizenry is significantly involved in rating programs (think of epinions or Amazon reviews), defensive wars like Afghanistan are more likely and preemptive wars like Iraq, perhaps less. I really don’t care, as long as we all share a sense of what’s right and willing to commit wholeheartedly to, since that’s the benchmark for an effective program, whether it’s military action or AmeriCorps. I hope it’s obvious that fine-grained citizen involvement is the opposite of the citizen initiatives so popular in California. Those are not fine-grained, but rather the bumper-sticker school of governance.

Along the way, we’d discover that all of us reasoning together are a lot smarter than some of us. My sense is that smarter-than-average people of both ends of the spectrum are scared to death of a broad-based democracy.

The Internet mustn’t be simply a way to win elections but a basis for governance.

If Estonia can do this stuff, surely we can.

12:24:26 AM    

Some of the Gulf War POWs were tortured, mostly pilots. A judge awarded them damages payable from the Iraqi funds now controlled by the White House, which refuses to release the money.

On Tuesday, Veteran’s Day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked why the administration won’t permit former Gulf War POWs to receive the funds awarded them by a judge. This is a section of the official transcript, starting about halfway through the press conference. Joe Conason’s Journal provided the pointer. (I’ve bolded the operative language.)

Q Scott, there are 17 former POWs from the first Gulf War who were tortured and filed suit against the regime of Saddam Hussein. And a judge has ordered that they are entitled to substantial financial damages. What is the administration’s position on that? Is it the view of this White House that that money would be better spent rebuilding Iraq rather than going to these former POWs?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t know that I view it in those terms, David. I think that the United States — first of all, the United States condemns in the strongest terms the brutal torture to which these Americans were subjected. They bravely and heroically served our nation and made sacrifices during the Gulf War in 1991, and there is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. That’s what our view is.

Q But, so — but isn’t it true that this White House —
Q They think they’re is an —
Q Excuse me, Helen — that this White House is standing in the way of them getting those awards, those financial awards, because it views it that money better spent on rebuilding Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, there’s simply no amount of money that can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering —

Q Why won’t you spell out what your position is?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m coming to your question. Believe me, I am. Let me finish. Let me start over again, though. No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of a very brutal regime, at the hands of Saddam Hussein. It was determined earlier this year by Congress and the administration that those assets were no longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq. But again, there is simply no amount of compensation that could ever truly compensate these brave men and women.

Q Just one more. Why would you stand in the way of at least letting them get some of that money?

MR. McCLELLAN: I disagree with the way you characterize it.

Q But if the law that Congress passed entitles them to access frozen assets of the former regime, then why isn’t that money, per a judge’s order, available to these victims?

MR. McCLELLAN: That’s why I pointed out that that was an issue that was addressed earlier this year. But make no mistake about it, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the torture that these brave individuals went through —

Q — you don’t think they should get money?

MR. McCLELLAN: — at the hands of Saddam Hussein. There is simply no amount of money that can truly compensate those men and women who heroically served —

Q That’s not the issue —

MR. McCLELLAN: — who heroically served our nation.

Q Are you opposed to them getting some of the money?

MR. McCLELLAN: And, again, I just said that that had been addressed earlier this year.

Q No, but it hasn’t been addressed. They’re entitled to the money under the law. The question is, is this administration blocking their effort to access some of that money, and why?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t view it that way at all. I view it the way that I stated it, that this issue was —

Q But you are opposed to them getting the money.

MR. McCLELLAN: This issue was addressed earlier this year, and we believe that there’s simply no amount of money that could truly compensate these brave men and women for what they went through and for the suffering that they went through at the hands of Saddam Hussein —

Q So no money.

MR. McCLELLAN: — and that’s my answer.

10:15:13 PM    

This English major who flew airplanes for Uncle Sam doesn’t identify with being a veteran as much as many. I’ve probably mentioned it more on this blog than in daily life because it deflects the knee-jerk reaction of those who confuse their voting records with their self-interest.

The Dean Blog has some interesting comments today, in reply to a post by Jon Zall, Colonel, USAF (Ret), who wrote,

Why should military veterans, or anyone associated with the military, consider any option other than Mr. Bush for the coming 2004 election? I’m a veteran, retired with almost 27 years of service, who no longer believes this administration has the best interests of our veterans and our military in mind. Until two months ago, I (like many veterans) wasn’t going to consider any Democrat – after all, I had voted mostly Republican for 40 years. But the weight of events and the actions of the Bush administration, especially with regard to veterans and the use of our military, including the Reserves and National Guard, caused me to change my mind.

That’s why I decided to put the Veterans for Dean Blog into play. Something inside me said that if I am needing to talk about a lot of things that really bother me about the use of our military and support of our veterans, then I suspect there may be many more of you out there. The Blog is a forum for all of you – you don’t have to be a veteran or in the military – who don’t like the direction their country is taking. And, know this for sure, the blog is NOT intended to create dissent among our troops, veterans or active duty, but to intelligently lay out and discuss ideas. This blog also links to other important Veterans-for-Dean websites and other links of interest for you to check out.

Some of the comments are even more emotional than most. I’ve added links where helpful, but not edited content:

“I amalos a veteran. Yesterday I at least emotionally participated in an important birthday – on Nov 10 1775 Capt Robert Mullin enlisted the first United States Marines.

I think the current adminstration’s treatment both of veterans and of currently serving military personnel (gerual service and activated reservs and guard) is atrocious.

David Hackworth‘s various enterprises have been showcasing the horoors for quite some time now.Stars and Stripes has printed a survey on morale.

The general press has bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, but does not put it all together.

– nationalizing the seized Irqi assets to help pay (Halliburton and Bechtel) for rebuilidingn Iraq, rather than allowing those assets to pay for formerly imprisoned American servicement who won a judgment in US courts

– making wounded and injured service personnel pay for their meals while in hospitals

– cutting the additional pay for combat service… gee, if one is shot after MAJOR combat operations is one any less shot?

– making veterans endure 6 month waits for initial medical appointments

– putting guard and reservists in vermin-infested barracks and not giving them the same access to medical care at plcaes like Ft Stewar in Georgia

– for perosnnel whose home base is in the US, providing R & R trasnportation only as afar as Baltimore, and then leaving them on their own, timewise and moeny wise, to get to see family and loved ones

I could go on and on. There are ohters on this blog who could provide far more.

This is an adminstration that reallyb did not value the combat infantry and armor divisions – after all, Rumsfeld wanted to totally reshaped the military. If we had the miltiary he ahd wnated, think how badly off we would be in Iraq today.

The mistreatment of those who ahve served and continue to serve should be reason enough for those who care about the military to reject the current administration.

Colonel, welcome to our cause, to send Bush back to Crawford.

KJB USMC serial number 2105714
Posted by ken fr arlington va at November 11, 2003 02:03 PM

__________________________________________

wonderful well written piece Colonel!!!!
Your beliefs are supported in the Des Moines Register this morning.

Des Moines, Ia Register, Metro Section Headline..
MORE VETERANS SEEK COUNTY AID

Subhead……
Living costs, job losses, age issues prompt the need for assistance

First line…..
A growing number of Iowa’s veterans are asking counties for emergency assistance with rent, utilities or other bills.

Isn’t it a sad state of affairs when the lead story is about the trouble veterans are having pay rent and utilities.

Posted by Darrell in Iowa at November 11, 2003 02:23 PM
__________________________________________

My Dad told me he was listening to a radio show the other day and heard a story that goes something like this:

There’s a gentleman who has three sons over in Iraq fighting the war. Each and every day, on his lunch break, this father goes down the street from his place of employment, and for one hour, he holds up a poster of a soldier that has died that day or that week. He blows up the pictures from the internet or newspaper.

While he was doing this, people would drive by everyday, screaming how un-American he is, people would yell anti-homosexual names at him (even though he’s straight), and say he has no faith in his country. They’d honk their horns and berate him…a man who is lending his three brave children to the service of our country.

He finally got them to stop honking…by holding up a “Honk fo
r Peace” sign alongside the picture of the fallen soldier. That, my friends, is sad, sad, sad.

To this man, who’s children are in harm’s way, to all of those who are fighting, and to all of those we have lost in defense of our flag, I am in your debt, and so is our country.

Regards,
Shane in Ohio
Posted by Shane in Ohio at November 11, 2003 02:43 PM

Wage Slaves with Rifles

Military people are the wage slaves of the industry called America. As corporations manipulate their hourly employees, so does this administration use cheap labor to express its foreign policy.

When veterans and soldiers look at their values and not their voting habits, Dean is the obvious choice.

If you’re in the military or a union or paid for doing real work with your hands, you are in the same position relative to senior management. Even if loyal to your direct boss, you’re an expense from the viewpoint of senior management.

Major corporations are the spiritual godfathers of this administration. Just as companies are cutting benefits and raising CEO bonuses, so is the Department of Defense. The Army Times has a Veteran’s Day article about active duty benefits, “An Act of Betrayal – In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts“. The Department of Defense (DoD) has closed 19 commissaries and may close 19 more; and is considering the fate of 58 schools it runs around the country. As with so many initiatives, it seems DoD had made up its mind to study the closings prior to 9/11, and seems unaffected by later events:

The two initiatives are the latest in a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty.

The roots of all these efforts reach back to the highest levels of the Defense Department.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made no secret of his desire to get the military out of support activities that are not central to its core war-fighting functions, said Joseph Tafoya, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity. As soon as he arrived at the Pentagon three years ago, Tafoya said, Rumsfeld began asking: “Why am I running stores? Why am I in education?”

Schools for dependents are a big issue. Military families don’t pay local taxes so they have no voice in local districts, which don’t have room for them anyway. The military has better schools than most districts, perhaps because the peer group is families more disciplined than average. Further, the local schools are struggling already. “I would be transferring 800 students into a 600-student [public] school, and have no voting representation in the school board,” says Lt. Gen. William Lennox, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Community Watch

Military people live in some of the tightest-knit communities on earth. Sure, families transfer in and out, but common values, experience and challenges knit everyone together. That’s why it’s so striking that a commander would describe call these cuts a “betrayal,” not as an off-the-record slip of the lip, but as carefully as any order :

A ‘personal affront’

“Betrayal — write that down and put it in your report,” said Col. John Kidd, garrison commander of Fort Stewart, Ga., testifying at Tafoya’s forum on the need to keep military-run schools on his post. “As a commander, I will fight this tooth and nail. Folks down there are not just militant on this issue. They will march on Washington.”

Lowe, the Quantico base commander, said he never has seen his community more united than it is over the schools issue.

“The very fact that this transfer study is being conducted at this time when Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen and their families are increasingly required to give more of themselves and to go in harm’s way is taken by many as a personal affront,” he said. “It raises serious questions about DoD’s commitment to all quality-of-life issues.”

Soldiers feel entitled. Maybe not so much in  peacetime, though they are. But when your ass is on the line and your wife can’t make ends meet, the last thing you’ll put up with is the loss of the preferential commissary (grocery store) pricing, or seeing your kids shoe-horned into an under-funded public school.

“Col. Larry Ruggley, garrison commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., showed local newspapers with headlines noting a two-week delay in the opening of civilian schools outside the gate because of budget wrangling.

Fort Campbell soldiers will continue to be deployed, Ruggley said. “We look to the stability and support of the school environment on Fort Campbell to take care of the children. It’s all about the soldier we put in harm’s way.”

Col. John Neubauer, commander of Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., said his base’s schools outperform those outside the gate. DDESS students at Maxwell consistently score in the 75th percentile nationally, he said, while “students outside the gate consistently score in the lower half.”

“We have a close relationship with the local community,” he said. “But the state of Alabama refuses to adequately fund education.”

The New York Army Times

The above links are to, respectively:

1. The San Jose Mercury News
2. The House of Representatives
3. Veterans for Common Sense
4. Gainesville, Georgia Times
5. Fox News
6. Des Moines Register
7. The Army Times

This isn’t some left-leaning paper in the heart of Gothomorrah. The administration and its sympathizers can explain away bitching N’Yawkas, but not red-blooded Americans  calling them on the treatment of our troops–the greatest symbol of righteousness for the Republicans’ entire political base.

How stupid are these people?

2:10:34 PM    

It’s easier to invent the future than predict it.
              —Alan Kay

We’re at democracy’s inflection point. Democracy is where the web was in 1993 and we can shape it any way we like. Broadcast politics seems vulnerable and the key to political power is to let go of the illusion that politicians, governments, campaigns and political parties are in charge of the voice (power) of the people (polis).

It’s the governance, stupid! But the means to effect better governance will arise only from politicians and stakeholders dissatisfied with governance as usual.

This is an outline of some obvious thoughts about specific ways that politics might be affected by Internet technologies. Historically, every campaign is an echo chamber striving to become a megaphone for its master’s voice. The Internet allows the echo chamber to expand to include millions of voices mastering the politicians.

I had not realized until recently that the voices outside an Internet-powered campaign must drown out the voices within. The Internet clue is that any campaign is assured of victory if it can inspire a smart mob to use the right tools to organize itself into a viral, loose hierarchy. Until the constituents build their own bridges and form their own hierarchies of influence, every campaign’s echo chamber is sound and fury signifying not quite enough.

Assumptions

• Politics follows money
• The 45th President will reflect and amplify the forces that elect him
• Only our preconceptions limit our ingenuity and power

Desirable outcomes

• Universal participation
• Issue-based voting
• Fact-based campaigning
• Voter-financed campaigns
• Low average contribution amounts
• Inter-campaign civility (community vs. advocacy)

Strategy: Leverage the individual campaigns’ urgency

If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.

Like the tech industry, emergent democracy needs critical deadlines to make urgent the deliverables that we might otherwise express as theories. Primaries and elections provide those deadliness and change agents must embrace that urgency. Change needs a series of galvanizing conferences and enterprises to develop the next generation of tools to assemble broad but powerful constituencies.

We should not assume that this public-spirited activity has no ROI. As the Republicans have demonstrated, the payoff from winning is to influence the $1.7 trillion annual budget. To those without extraordinary access and influence, the elimination of special interests is as profitable as was the gaining of influence by the current holders.

• Consensus-building open source web apps
• Each nomination and election provides last minute deadlines
• Election season is development crunch time

Basics

Democracy’s essential resource is an unassailable voting system. Closed source unauditable voting can only be offset by a broad-based voter-verifiable ballot record. Until e-voting is open source and auditable, a few imperfect mechanisms might stem the rush to managed polling:

• Digital photos of voting screens
• Voter-controlled digital ID
• WiFi PollCams monitoring sensitive polling places (from 100′)
• Open vote declaration through auditable web sites

Voter Education through Fact-rich Timelines

• Issue-based event timelines
  • Documented, linked statements depicting the history of issues & events
  • Transforms arcane facts into a time-based story
  • Abundant charts & graphics
• Categories
  • Military procurement
  • Energy policy
  • Health care industry
  • Individual lobbyists and their clients & fees
  • Corporate convictions, plea bargains & individual wealth
    • SEC & court records
• The $1,000,000 Timeline Challenge
  • Prove an error, win $1,000
  • Quiz show

The Web-based Electorate

• Multiple opportunities for citizen expression
• A low level of expression may evolve through higher forms.
  • Email becomes
  • Blog comments become
  • Group blogs become
  • A personal blog
• Blogs may aggregate into a Knowledge Base
      (Might the knowledge base finally arrive?
       Perhaps through the urgency of a campaign.)
• Election Issue namespace to aggregate sentiment
• Comments can aggregate into issues compilations
  • Campaign blog comments are implicitly issue-based, begging for aggregation and indexing.
    6:28:29 PM    

The most unexpected things define our realities. We’re cut off from the truth, not because we can’t handle it, but because “journalists” won’t compromise their access to the people who are lying to them. Then RSS and blogging and Google come along and we’re surprisingly more connected to the nuances that have always been under-reported by journalists.

Secondary markets could be an equally surprising contender as the blogware of nation-building finance. “Secondary market” is the name for a capital market for investment instruments bundled into large offerings. When these instruments are sold, they yield very large amounts for whatever purpose the underlying debt serves.

Plain English:

1. You get a $10,000 student loan by signing forms that are exactly the same as a million other student loans
2. Because they conform to its student loan standard, all the loans are guaranteed by the US Government.
3. Your bank sells the right to your payments to an intermediary, which means your bank can make far more loans than it could by using its own depositors’ capital.
4. The intermediary sells shares in its $15 billion± portfolio of federally-insured student loans to investors.
5. This allows large and small investors to provide the funds that the government and the banks otherwise could not.
6. College tuition rises because there’s so much money available.
7. Many more students spend spring break in Ft. Lauderdale.

Well, the intent is good.

The Policy Engine

Government policies are expressed through money. As the Republicans have been proving lately, if you control the budget, you control policy.

Let’s deconstruct the essence of government, which fortunately turns out to be less complicated than we might think. About 700 people in Washington, working closely with about 20,000 lobbyists, create laws. (Otto Von Bismark once said, “There are two things you don’t want to see being made—sausage and legislation,” a variation of the caveat against visiting your favorite restaurant’s kitchen.) Out of that fetid swamp of special interests some imperatives arise, and so our destiny is bent to the will of the couple dozen or so people who manage the perceptions and careers of those 700 people.

Once this spending engine revs up, the spending rules are interpreted by the people in the Executive branch to mean what most excites them. This is how an appropriation is parsed into a $25 million Halliburton bridge. Cynical? You bet. Once you’ve seen sausage or laws being made, you’re likely to become a disillusioned vegetarian.

But what about the Second Superpower? As the peace-loving majority finds its voice and collective will, how might a stateless consortium of like minds exert their force to bring about what Dwight Eisenhower envisioned 40 years ago:

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Follow the Money

It doesn’t take a government to spend money. Big government hires big companies to spend big bucks, whether needed or not. That’s why we’re spending like Americans in Iraq rather than spending like Iraqis, who know how to build bridges much less expensively than Americans. They’d probably employ more people, taking idle hands off the stocks of rifles. As I said last time, why not create web applications that are, literally, loan applications? And work reports combined with PayPal requests. All this assumes you’re interested in redevelopment and not in funneling gobs of money into select companies.

In order to hire Iraqi companies and people to do what you want them to do, you’d have to pepper Iraq with WiFi and ATMs and debit cards. With those in place, people could do useful things and be paid for it, like the list from last time:

• Credibly commit to build a $25 million Halliburton bridge for $1 million = $50,000
• Deliver engineering drawings for the bridge = $50,000
• Start, continue, finish bridge construction, etc., etc., etc.= $100,000, $100,000, $100,000
• Send a child to a non-religious school for a month = $10 (?)
• Teach in a non-religious school for a month = $500 (?)
• Guard a pipeline within view of one of the 100,000 new webcams = $25/night

Most importantly, it would let people on the street experience an actual benefit from the occupation, and to feel invested in a civil society. This is not the kind of program a traditional government would even consider.

But the Second Superpower is not a government, just a consortium of like-minded peaceniks. Even though war is very profitable for some, peace is profitable for many more, with myriad options for profiting off productivity and the capitalization to support it. A web-based rebuild Iraq portal would create agreements as standardized as student or mortgage loans. Once bundled, they constitute a debt package large enough for the capital markets to pay attention to.

And enough capital to rebuild a country without the messy inconvenience of occupying it.

2:26:58 PM