Ever wonder why the various intelligence agencies weren’t sharing intelligence prior to 9/11? The Likely Story has the answers (link via Uggabugga) :

Three weeks after taking office, George W. Bush signed a National Security Presidential Directive that restructured the National Security Council. It included this command:

“The existing system of Interagency Working Groups is abolished.”

The Counter-Terrorism Security Group, Critical Infrastructure Coordination Group, Weapons of Mass Destruction Preparedness, Consequences Management and Protection Group, and the interagency working group on Enduring Constitutional Government were all abolished, to be reconstituted at some time in a new incarnation.

“Except for those established by statute, other existing NSC interagency groups, ad hoc bodies, and executive committees are also abolished as of March 1, 2001″

No wonder they couldn?t connect the dots. They were too busy redrawing the org chart and demoting Clinton-era appointees to actually work together to protect the country from terrorism.

So lemme get this straight….George W. Bush deliberately dismantled the interagency communications systems within the NSC without having a replacement? Now I don’t know why Bush would do something that stupid, but I assume that the reason is that the old system was deemed to be inefficient (although I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of irrational hatred of Clinton and/or gub’mint bureaucrats was also part of his reasoning). That said, wouldn’t an inefficient means of communication be better than no means of communication?

Here’s another good reason to register to vote before next year’s elections :

A US department of energy panel of experts which provided independent oversight of the development of the US nuclear arsenal has been quietly disbanded by the Bush administration, it emerged yesterday.

The decision to close down the national nuclear security administration advisory committee - required by law to hold public hearings and issue public reports on nuclear weapons issues - has come just days before a closed-door meeting at a US air force base in Nebraska to discuss the development of a new generation of tactical “mini nukes” and “bunker buster” bombs, as well as an eventual resumption of nuclear testing.

Ed Markey, a senate congressman and co-chairman of a congressional taskforce on non-proliferation, said: “Instead of seeking balanced expert advice and analysis about this important topic, the department of energy has disbanded the one forum for honest, unbiased external review of its nuclear weapons policies.”
. . .
“The Bush administration is considering policy changes that will alter the role of nuclear weapons in national defence,” Mr Markey said. “Given the importance and sheer complexity of the issues raised … why was the only independent contemplative body studying nuclear weapons disbanded - and disbanded in such a surreptitious fashion?”

Why isn’t the fact that we’ve got the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth enough for these people? Now he wants to make “mini-nukes”? Every time I hear about the Bush Administration’s desire to develop new nuclear weapons, it reawakens my cold-war childhood fear of nuclear annihilation. The fact that Bush and his buddies are acting like kids in a candy store when it comes to nuclear weapons scares the hell out of me.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out :

John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.
. . .
Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s abandoned futures-trading market for predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups.

The official indicated that Poindexter had become a lightning rod for criticism. Poindexter served as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser in the 1980s and was convicted for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, a conviction that later was set aside.

Saying “was set aside” was a cute way of saying that he got off on a technicality. As I understand it, his convictions for “conspiracy (obstruction of inquiries and proceedings, false statements, falsification, destruction and removal of documents), two counts of obstruction of Congress, and two counts of false statements” were dismissed because he’d already been given immunity on other charges and the jury improperly used his immunized testimony against him (correct me if I’m wrong here). Isn’t this just the legal equivalent of a kid claming “no touch backs” in a game of tag? Even if he hadn’t gotten off, he would have likely recieved a pardon for George Bush Sr. Either way, John Poindexter is a goddamn crook who should have never been allowed to work in the government again.

Poor Georgie. He might have to do a little “work” (and by that I mean “self-congratulatory cheerleading”) during his month-long vacation :

Fundraisers will help will fill President Bush’s schedule during his month-long working vacation at his ranch near Crawford.

In August, Bush will mix public policy events with six fund-raisers — in Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington and Minnesota.

The practice allows the administration, in certain cases, to bill taxpayers for half the travel costs of the political activity.

Yeah, I’m sure that Clinton did plenty of this himself, but am I the only one who’s comepletely disgusted by the fact that Bush (a) gets to take a month for vacation and (b) has replaced almost every press conference that a normal president would have with this endless series of “public policy events”, which are essentially political campaign stops made at the taxpayers expense?

In case you haven’t done it yet, REGISTER TO VOTE. I know voting can be a big pain in the ass, but it’s really important (of course, you already knew that). With the recall election coming up, you’ve got less than a month to register. All you have to do is click on this link and you can register to vote only. It’s fast and easy. For those of you in the other 49 states, click here to go to the FEC’s National Mail Voter Registration Form.

According to Glenview State Bank, despite all his faults, Hitler was really good on the economic front :

Glenview State Bank executives apologized to Jewish people on the bank’s Web site Tuesday night, after a bank newsletter to customers praised Adolf Hitler as an economic leader of the 1930s.
. . .
The apology came after the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Defamation League started getting complaints about the bank’s July newsletter and the bank president’s depiction of Hitler as an economic leader–arguments that the author, who is the bank president, compared to the performance of today’s U.S. economy.
. . .
Anti-Defamation League regional director Richard Hirschhaut said he requested the apology during a conversation he had Tuesday with the bank’s main owners, which include bank holding company Chairman and Chief Executive John Jones and bank President Raub.

“Hitler’s economic policies cannot be divorced from his great policies of virulent anti-Semitism, racism and genocide,” Hirschhaut wrote in a letter to the bank. “There are really no circumstances under which Hitler should be held as a good model.”

In the 1,500-word newsletter, Raub talks of how Hitler was the only major leader during the 1930s who successfully resuscitated his country’s economy when others such as President Franklin Roosevelt could not, and “led German workers to work harder than anyone else in Europe.”
. . .
Raub said Hitler avoided deflation unlike other European nations and reduced unemployment.

This year, our economy has been beaten up by war, sluggish auto sales and stagnant business spending, Raub said. Yet consumers keep spending money, and the stock market has gone up, a sign that confidence is up in America.
. . .
The point of the newsletter? Glenview’s investment managers are confident, “and that’s why we’re buying and holding our favorite long-term growth stocks,” the newsletter ends.

I wonder if last year’s newsletter said something like “During Jefferson Davis’s tenure, the unemployment rate among African-Americans was at it’s lowest level in history.”

Okay this is just crazy. We’ve know for a while that Bush is expected to have around $200 million to spend during next year’s campaign, but check this out :

Q Mr. President, with no opponent, how can you spend $170 million or more on your primary campaign?

THE PRESIDENT: Just watch. (Laughter.) Keep going.

Q Yes, sir. And with 15 fundraisers scheduled between — for the summer months, do you worry about the perception that you’re unduly attentive to the interests of people who can afford to spend $2,000 to see you?

THE PRESIDENT: Michael, I think American people, now that they’ve realized I’m going to seek reelection, expect me to seek reelection. They expect me to actually do what candidates do. And so, you’re right, I’ll be spending some time going out and asking the American people to support me. But most of my time, as I say in my speeches — as I’m sure you’ve been bored to tears listening to — is that there is a time for politics, and that’s going to be later on. I’ve got a lot to do. And I will continue doing my job. And my job will be to work to make America more secure.

That’s right, he’s planning to spend $170 in the primary and he’s not running against anyone!! I just hope the Democrats are paying attention. This is a larger scaler version of the trick that Gray Davis pulled last year, so we can be pretty sure that whomever Bush spends his cash campaigning against is the guy that we should be throwing our weight behind.

Is it really news to anyone that Bush doesn’t like gay people? Kevin Drum has pointed me to the president’s remarks today about gay marriage which pretty much fall in line with everything else he’s ever said on the subject:

Yes, I am mindful that we’re all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of their neighbor’s eye when they got a log in their own. I think it’s very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country. On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that’s really where the issue is heading here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.

I think by that last part he means “I want to ban homos from having the same rights as normal folks and we’re looking into ways of forcing this belief on others without making me look like an asshole.”

My apologies to those of you who are sick of this subject, but this is something that I think is really messed up. My main objections to this aren’t moral (although I do think betting on future attacks is a very morbid), but I honestly don’t think this will work. There’s a number of good articles that debunk this market-based voodoo. Among the best are this one from Slate :

Set aside for a moment the cognitive dissonance of a conservative, faith-based administration using government-sponsored gambling to set policy. And forget that the market represented an effort to meld two secretive cultures that have been discredited for their recent catastrophic failures?Wall Street securities analysis and Washington intelligence analysis.

More important, a havoc market wouldn’t benefit from the rationality that regular financial markets require. By and large, markets for futures?as well as stocks and bonds?are presumed to be efficient and rational, Internet bubble notwithstanding. This collective rationality is precisely what the Pentagon was hoping to harness by creating a market for geopolitical events.

But in the Middle East, many of the figures who would have driven the pricing of PAM securities are not what international relations types refer to as “rational actors.” Suicide bombers almost by definition are irrational, or at least not governed by a rationality with which we are familiar. We routinely refer to the main players with terms that place them beyond the field of reason?Saddam Hussein is “the Butcher of Baghdad,” Osama Bin Laden is a “madman.”

By contrast, while Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan may be inscrutable, and many executives engage in short-term behavior that causes long-term damage, almost all market movers?chief executives like Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, mutual fund managers?collectively exhibit a far higher level of rationality than, say, Mullah Omar. It’s far easier to get inside the head of Sandy Weill (he wants to acquire more banks) than it is to plumb the Machiavellian depths of Yasser Arafat’s mind. How can we expect rational people to make sound bets on minds that may be unsound?

Another potential problem was that the market might defeat itself. The Pentagon wanted to create the PAM in order to gather information it could use to stop terrorism and reduce instability. If it saw, say, that people were betting heavily on the assassination of Iraq’s interim president, the Defense Department would start searching for some assassination plot in the hopes of rooting it out. But preventing the assassination would cause all the people who bet on it to lose their money. Insofar as the market helped the United States stabilize the region and prevent terror, investors would suffer. The more it succeeded on policy, the more it would fail as a market, and the sooner it would collapse.

…and this comment from a reader of Tapped :

The way that markets work, at least in theory, is that persons who have knowledge, or think they do, are willing to “buy” that position. In a futures market like the Iowa one, people are essentially betting on a particular outcome. Presumably the knowledge or insight they have about that is based on the intelligence they gather — reading newspapers, hearing candidates, judging the opinions of friends, neighbors and commentators. That information may not be accurate, or some participant might have more current information or more detailed sources — but it is information that is available to everyone, because political candidates act in public, and people’s opinions are expressed in one way or another.
But for the Policy Analysis Market to work, participants would have to have knowledge of terrorist threats and activity. Now, the terrorists themselves aren’t going to be engaged in the market (unless they are trying to profit from their own violent deeds), so the participants would have to be those who have some intelligence on the basis of which to purchase or sell a position. Without that intelligence, it’s just gambling. But who has that intelligence? We’ve already seen the logistical, political and interpretive problems that the CIA and other “official” intelligence gathering agencies have. Would a participant in this market field their own intelligence agents to compete with the CIA? (That would take privatization of government functions to a new low!) Without that intelligence, there is no basis for the market to reflect anything other than persons taking a guess at a result. That wouldn’t be a useful tool for policy analysis. You and I might believe that there is no known rational basis for an “orange” terrorism alert — and we might plan our actions on the basis of that belief — but the rationality of that belief has no bearing on whether there truly is a heightened security problem.

Even in their support of this idea, Wired magazine had to admit that predictive markets aren’t perfect :

The Iowa market hasn’t been perfect — it forecast a Democrat-controlled senate in 2002. But over the course of 14 elections, the Iowa Electronic Markets’ stock prices were on average a half of a percentage point closer to the results of the actual political races than the final polls were.

The price of orange juice futures has even been shown to accurately predict the weather, noted David Pennock, a senior research scientist at Overture Services who has done extensive surveys on the reliability of such markets.

Traders on the Hollywood Stock Exchange last year correctly picked 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees in the eight biggest categories, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Setting up intelligence analysis as a game will only result in people making predictions based on spotting trends, when they should only be making predictions based on intelligence. Picking 35 out of 40 Oscar picks may be a neat trick, but we’re not trying to write a pice for Entertainment Weekly here, we’re trying to make decisions that shape the future of our country and could ultimately prevent or lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. This requires perfect information, not speculation based on undefinable trends.

Ultimately, markets tend to reward those who already have a lot of capital to begin with. If this market existed last year, do you think the miniscule bets of Joseph Wilson and other peeons in the CIA would have been enough to offset the market trend that favored the idea that Iraq had a nuclear weapon? Of course not. And that’s ultimately why this is a bad idea.

A Terrorism Futures market wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between good trends and bad ones. Buying a hundred shares of the truth won’t make much of a dent when your superiors are buying a million shares of self-serving bullshit. Especially since the whole plan doesn’t account for exactly what the data is that’s influencing the trends.

That said, DARPA does deserve credit for “thinking outside the box” (that phrase sends chills down my spine), but there’s got to be a better way to get people to share data than this.

If you want a good microcosm of Bush’s overall performance on homeland security, take a look at yesterday’s headline :

U.S. Warns al-Qaida May Hijack Planes

Federal officials say they have no plans to raise the nation’s terrorism alert level despite warnings that five-man al-Qaida teams may be planning to hijack and crash more airplanes, similar to the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The hijackers may try to calm passengers and make them believe they were on a hostage, not suicide, mission,” a warning distributed over the weekend to airlines and law enforcement agencies said. “The hijackers may attempt to use common items carried by travelers, such as cameras, modified as weapons.”

…and today’s headline :

U.S. May Cut Air Marshals Despite Warning

The Transportation Security Administration wants to reduce funding for air marshals even as the government is warning about the possibility al-Qaida may try more suicide hijackings.

The TSA is seeking approval from Congress to cut $104 million from the air marshal program to help offset a $900 million budget shortfall. It’s unclear how many of the estimated several thousand air marshal jobs would be affected.

“When we are faced with more priorities than we have funding to support, we have to go through a process of trying to address the most urgent needs,” TSA spokesman Robert Johnson said.

Now Bush sure does want us to believe that his biggest priority is keeping us safe, but it’s clear that his priorities change somewhere between the podium and the checkbook. Bush has this uncanny ability to pull money out of some sort of magical hat. How else do you explain how he’s able to secure billions of dollars for tax cuts and the war in Iraq but can’t pony up enough cash to protect us against the first specific threat (and the only big threat that’s already been used against us) we’ve received since 9/11?