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 Saturday, April 10, 2004
A nice article from Newsday that starts out with this:If you knew that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received a memo a month before Pearl Harbor entitled, 'Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific,' and that he had done nothing about that information, would that knowledge change your perception of FDR as a wise war leader? This memo came out on August 6. On August 15, we had one of the terrorists under arrest. The Administration had 3 weeks before 9/11. But since the President was on vacation and did not seem to attach much importance to bin Laden and al-Queda, why should the people who worked for him? How would we feel about Roosevelt and his administration if 3 weeks before Pearl Harbor, and a week after getting a memo about a possible attack, they had captured a Japanese spy who had the info about Pearl Harbor, and THEY DID NOTHING? This will be the legacy of this Administration. They did nothing. Worse, they then acted to attack a country that had no link to the terrorust attack, destroying the country's credibility, as well as its bank account. A worldwide poll reported by the BBC puts concerns about the US at number 1, higher than terrorism, war hunger and climate change. More than half the people surveyed feared the US. What a change a few years make! Due to the actions of this administration. 11:48:33 PM 
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A nice time line of the first 200 days or so of this Administration's lack of planning and foresight. Nice to know that after 7 hard month's of work, Bush took the longest presidential vacation in a generation, while Moussaoui sat in jail. The problem with a top-down approach to running complex systems (and this Administration is the most top-down in my lifetime) is that the inefficiency of information flow swiftly reduces its flexibility and a ability to react. No one can make a damned decision. We have Rice this week saying that she could not do anything about terrorism because there were not any recommendations attached!
Fighting asymmetric attacks requires nimbleness and independent thought, something that is hard to find in this Administration. They canned anyone who had a different opinion or way of thinking. They are exactly the wrong kind of leaders to deal with the changes rocking our world. We will continue to decline as long as we have leaders like this Administration. 9:50:39 AM
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Contemporary history? This.... Contemporary history? This from the Associated Press ... President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for... [Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall]
They will have to finally give up the August 6 memo because of this. Someone who knows what it says is now leaking that info to the media, giving a lie to what Rice said. i wonder if she will regret testifying under oath. 1:02:54 AM
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Department of troubling.... Department of troubling juxtapositions ... At the center of a storm brewing for more than two weeks, Rice on Thursday consistently stressed before the packed hearing room on Capitol Hill that the Bush White House was fully engaged against al-Qaida.... [Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall]
Nice. On a day of severe fighting in Iraq, when one of his aides is testifying in front of a commission on 9/11, Bush is doing the same thing he did the month before 9/11, taking a vacation. And he gets to be on TV fishing, all for his campaign. I hope someone in this Administration is planning some response to Iraq, because it certainly does not seem to be high on his priority list. 12:56:16 AM
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Corporate Mercenaries Create Sharing Network. WP. In response to the challenge of non-state networks intent on the destruction of the nation-state system, the US formulated its own non-state actors. These corporate mercenaries are now creating their own network in response to US inaction.
Under assault by insurgents and unable to rely on U.S. and coalition troops for intelligence or help under duress, private security firms in Iraq have begun to band together in the past 48 hours, organizing what may effectively be the largest private army in the world, with its own rescue teams and pooled, sensitive intelligence.
The CPA's program management office has sought bids for a project to coordinate security among the 10 largest prime contractors and their subcontractors working on U.S.-backed reconstruction projects worth $18.4 billion. But the bids are still under review. In the meantime, the office is "trying to get at least some level of intelligence sanitized from the military that could be given to contractors," said Capt. Bruce A. Cole, spokesman for the program management office in Baghdad. That has not happened yet. The firms, stunned by the casualties they suffered this week and by the lack of a military response, have begun banding together to share their own operations-center telephone numbers and tips on threats, as well as to organize ways to rescue one another in a crisis.
"Each private firm amounts to an individual battalion," said one U.S. government official familiar with the developments. "Now they are all coming together to build the largest security organization in the world."
Is this a return of the condotteiri? [John Robb's Weblog]
Considering that about 20,000 of these people are supposedly over there, this bodes ill. 12:46:39 AM
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Math Joke. 
I just got this via email and don't know the copyright or the origin of this. If someone knows whether I should give credit to someone, please let me know. But it's too funny not to blog.
By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito's Web]
Not many good math jokes out there. 12:41:01 AM
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Which Apprentice Are You?. The second to last episode of The Apprentice is on tonight. Take the test, figure out which one of the Apprentice candidates is most like you. We're Bill: What is Bill's definition of "success"? If I can lead a happy... [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
Oh man! I am most like Bill but I really want Kwame to win becuase I don't like Bill. Bummer. 12:12:01 AM
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