There is an article in the New York Times this morning describing the build-up of Ethiopian troops in Somalia.
The Ethiopians are there to protect the nominal government of Somalia, (based in the town of Baidoa), from the Islamist militias which are based in Mogadishu and have the run of most of the rest of the country. All signs currently point to the two sides going to war within the next few weeks, if not sooner. Such a conflict would have disastrous humanitarian consequences for a region already wracked with strife and violence.

According to the Times, the Ethiopian intervention has been done “with tacit approval from the United States.”

Hardly surprising, given the United States’ all-pervading fear of Islamic governments. There is little the U.S. military could do directly, considering its current commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the fact it is something akin to political suicide at this point to mention “U.S. military involvement” and “Somalia” in the same sentence.

The fear, clearly, is that should the U.N.-recognized government of Somalia fall to the Islamist rebels, the new government would provide safe haven to terrorist groups. These groups would then have a new base of operations from which to launch attacks against the U.S. and its interests/allies, something we ostensibly went into Afghanistan and Iraq to eliminate.

However, according to the Times,

American officials have accused the Islamists of sheltering terrorists connected to Al Qaeda, but the Ethiopian troops’ presence seems to have only increased the potential for terrorist activity. Suicide bombers, unknown in Somalia until a few months ago, have attacked Baidoa twice recently, and last month the first Iraqstyle roadside bombs were detonated against Ethiopian convoys.

Residents of Mogadishu say hundreds of fighters from other Muslim countries have arrived at the city’s main airport in recent days, drawn by the Islamists’ blaring call for a holy war against Ethiopia and against America, which is especially despised here.

Exactly when and where has sending in a military force to root out terrorists from another country actually accomplished its goal. No, wait—let’s make it even easier than that. When and where has it not accomplished pretty much precisely the opposite?

According to the so-called “Bush Doctrine” (which is being applied via Ethiopia as a proxy in this case), the best way to combat terrorism is to send the military into the countries that harbor terrorist groups. We take out the terrorists and the corrupt, despotic regimes that protect them, and we bring freedom and democracy to the oppressed citizenry. Sounds great, but in practice, sending in more people with guns only aggravates the situation and spreads more chaos. The military, supposedly there to do good, shoots people and blows stuff up. Is it any surprise that the details of who is shooting and the political/ideological reasons why they’re shooting get lost on the population caught in the crossfire?

Courtesy of this morning’s Washington Post:

In its policy review, the administration is focusing closely on the “80 percent solution,” that would bolster the political center of Iraq and effectively leave in charge the Shiite and Kurdish parties that account for 80 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people and that won elections a year ago. Vice President Cheney’s office has vigorously argued for the plan.

The last sentence of that paragraph tells us pretty much everything we need to know, doesn’t it?

The larger article concerns the Bush administration’s decision to postpone its announcement regarding its “new way forward” Iraq strategy until after the first of the year.

Meanwhile, according to the Times,

Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats.

High on the list of Saudi fears is the possibility that U.S. favoritism towards the Shiite majority in Iraqi and overtures to Iran could lead to ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority.

By most accounts, ethnic cleansing is already taking place in Iraq, as Sunnis and Shiites self-partition on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Once this self-imposed segregation, spurred on by sectarian violence, has divided Baghdad and the rest of the country into easily identifiable regions, it is a natural progression for Sunnis and Shiites to begin shelling each other.

The President and his supporters have apparently resigned themselves to the fact that Iraqis aren’t going to welcome us as liberators and shower us with rose petals. The failure to do so is due, no doubt, to a lack of will on the part of the Iraqis, as well as the dastardly American press, constantly on the lookout for new ways to blame American first. Nonetheless, casting about for a new strategy, the administration now seems to be looking at either increasing troop levels, or picking sides with the Shiites.

If there was any doubt left that the White House has neither the inclination nor the will to fundamentally alter the disastrous course it has consistently followed in Iraq, this latest round of news seals it. In a war supported by less than 30% of the public, the Bush administration is looking at sending more troops from a military already stretched dangerously thin. As an alternative, they are thinking about choosing one faction over the others, despite the risk of alienating what few allies we have in the Middle East, as well as spreading the conflict throughout the region.

The White House is run by single-minded fanatics who have demonstrated a profound ignorance of diplomatic nuance, as well as a tendency to settle upon the one option in any given situation that is the most crazy. There is nothing these guys can do in Iraq that will not make the situation worse. It is most likely true that a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq would lead to chaos, but that pretty much seems to be where things are headed now. Given that everything this administration touches turns to crap, an immediate withdrawal is increasingly seeming like the best remaining option. At least that way, we can attempt to re-engage on the diplomatic, humanitarian, and perhaps even military fronts in two years, once we have a different party running the country.

If I have to hear or read the word “bipartisan” one more GODDAMN time, I’m going to scream.

Loudly.

The assessment of the military, political, and social situation in Iraq provided by the Iraq Survey Group’s report is fairly bleak:

Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency, Shiite militias and death squads, al Qaeda, and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability.The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet
it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism is pervasive.

The “way forward” proposed by the report is, well, rather tepid. While the report itself is somewhat lengthy, the ISG’s recommendations boil down to the following:

1. Work with Iraq’s neighbors to build consensus in the region.
2. We’ll stand up as they stand down.

Well, duh.

To a large degree, the media has focused on the ISG’s recommendation to draw down U.S. combat troops by 2008. However, while the report does contain this recommendation, it hedges it with the caveat “if conditions on the ground permit.” In addition, the group recommends embedding up to 20,000 U.S. military personnel inside the Iraqi army in training and supervisory roles.

As for suggestion #1 above, the report refers specifically to Iran and Syria:

Iran should stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and use its influence over Iraqi Shia groups to encourage national reconciliation. The issue of Iran’s nuclear programs should continue to be dealt with by the
five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. Syria should control its border with Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq.

The idea of even approaching these to countries would be an improvement over the White House’s current alternating strategies of belligerent rhetoric and sulking silently in the corner. That being said, the ISG report offers no constructive means for moving forward with either Iran or Syria unless one counts “Keep making the same demands in the same way.”

These positions and recommendations are hardly a surprise, given that the Iraq Survey Group is composed entirely of people who supported going to war in the first place. While the group’s members, the press, and the punditocracy continue to gush about the amicable bipartisanship on display, “bipartisan” here would seem to be defined as “pro-war Republicans and pro-war Democrats.” As Glenn Greenwald has asked, why is this bunch any more qualified to tell us what to do about Iraq than the Bush administration?

Speaking of whom, the President said yesterday during his press appearance with Tony Blair, “Congress isn’t going to accept every recommendation in the report and neither will the administration.” By all accounts, the recommendations most likely to be ignored by the Presidents are… wait for it… to draw down troop levels and to engage with Iran and Syria.

And why should he listen to the ISG’s recommendations? He’s the Decider. According to the Times,

In light of the report’s stark warning that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating,” Mr. Bush came close to acknowledging mistakes. “You wanted frankness—I thought we would succeed quicker than we did,” the president said to a British reporter who asked for candor. “And I am disappointed by the pace of success.”

And…

If extremists emerge triumphant in the Middle East, Mr. Bush warned, “History will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know, what happened? How come free nations did not act to preserve the peace?”

Note the “…than we did” in the first quote above, as well as “did not act to preserve the peace” in the second. Clearly, Bush still believes (or is acting like he believes) that the we already have succeeded and that we have preserved the peace by our actions in Iraq. Interesting definitions, but there are more than a few grieving Iraqi and American families who might disagree with them.

Following up on his comment on my Jose Padilla post from a few days ago, Craig proposes that the rights afforded to U.S. citizens by the Constitution should be applied to foreign nationals:

To summarize: my position here is that there are good reasons those constitutional rules were created for US citizens; and that the reasons are equally (if not more so) valid when it comes to foreign nationals. We therefore ought to be conducting trials of terror suspects in accordance with the US constitution, regardless of whether the constitution strictly applies. To the extent that we do otherwise, we are permitting and even condoning miscarriages of justice.

Most of the likely objections to such a plan (“They don’t pay taxes!”) are specious and easily dismissed. Our government sprang from the idea that as humans, we possess rights, and that the government ought to be set up in order to protect and guarantee those rights. Of course, early versions had a bit of trouble with the “humans” part, but we’ve managed to patch up most of that over the course of the last 217 years.

Less easy to dismiss is the practical issue of which parts of the Constitution apply to non-citizens. We clearly cannot say that the Constitution in total applies to non-citizens; among other problems, we would quickly find ourselves in a strange legal loop with the 14th Amendment, which declares that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

How then do we decide which bits apply and which don’t, and on what basis do we make these decisions? Once we start saying that parts of the U.S. Constitution apply to people who are not citizens, have we not begun to erode the definition of citizen? Such an outcome is not necessarily bad, but it is clearly an issue that needs to be explored here.

On the other hand, what I find particularly troubling is that by and large, the crowd most eager to deny Constitutional protections to non-citizens are the same bunch busy screaming that we have the right—nay, the obligation to go into another country and kick over the government for the express purpose of spreading our political and legal system. If we’re going to insist that our brand of Freedom — Democracy is the cure for all evils and should be welcomed by countries the world-round, ought we not to be making sure that we’re treating people from those countries in accordance with our own laws?

After exactly one day of hearings, the Senate Armed Services Committee has voted unanimously to send President Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to the full Senate for confirmation. Given the ga-ga reception Gates received from the the committee yesterday, his final confirmation is all but assured.

Gates’ warm reception was largely due to his ability to respectfully state the obvious. That they were able to get answers out of him at all seemed to amaze a number of the Senators at the hearing. His admissions that the U.S. is not winning the war in Iraq and that there really are not any new options forthcoming were just icing on the cake.

Of course, compared to the rambling, confrontational, and often incoherent responses provided by Don Rumsfeld to questioners far and wide, anyone short of a belligerent drunk would probably be welcome to take over at the Pentagon at this point.

Come to think of it, the “belligerent drunk” theory would explain a lot about our strategy in Iraq.

Regarding Gates, it is hard to imagine that a change of leadership at Defense will make much difference. As Gates himself admitted yesterday, there aren’t any good options left. Meanwhile, although the press is largely swooning over a nominee who isn’t busily beating them up, there are a fair number of questions to be raised about Gates’ ethical background.

By most reputable accounts, Gates had more than a passing involvement the same scandal which seems to lurk in the closet of so many Bush administration officials, Iran-Contra. George Washington University’s National Security Archive project provides an excellent synopsis of Gates’ background. While there has never been any hard evidence that Gates was directly involved in Ronald Reagan’s secret and illegal scheme to sell weapons to Iranian terrorists and channel the proceeds to anti-government death squads in Nicaragua, his role as the CIA’s manager of intelligence analysis under DCI William Casey has been the cause of much suspicion.

Iran-Contra is too distant in the public mind and enough details of the scandal have been swept under the rug for it to cause any significant problems for Gates’ nomination. However, it is worth remembering as bi-partisan praise is heaped upon him for a performance that should be a baseline requirement for any public official.

The Washington Post published a story yesterday about the newspaper chain Gannett and an experiment it is conducting with some of the smaller local papers that it owns.

In this case, the article focuses on the Fort Myers News-Press. Rather than taking the Clear Channel approach of centralization and homogenization, Gannett, which owns 90 papers (including the News-Press and USA Today) is trying something different. According to the article:

The chain’s papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up “hyper-local,” street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa.

Key to this strategy are the papers’ “mobile journalists,” who use laptops, digital cameras, and cell phones to gather and publish news.

It is clear from the Post article that this experiment is mixed bag. I’m as skeptical as anyone about newspapers devoting space to all manner of local fluff. Moreover, journalists acting as publicists and de facto salespeople for the newspaper clearly takes one into the murkier waters of journalistic integrity.

That being said, it is fairly obvious that small- and even medium-market papers face a dim future unless they find some way to adapt to the changing media market. So far, most seem to be pursuing a path of consolidation and centralization. Look at the pages of nearly any paper below the top tier, and you’ll see mostly wire stories and syndicated columnists, a result of deep cuts to news rooms and editorial staffs across the country.

There are a number of local papers here in the Mid-Hudson Valley, and their web presences are uniformly terrible—infrequently updated, and featuring circa-1996 web design and techology. As a result, all of my news comes from national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, or nationally-oriented political blogs.

If one or more of these papers were to go the Gannett route, I harbor no illusions that a vibrant discussion of local politics and social issues would erupt. More likely, most of the coverage would be devoted to Wal-Mart grand openings and bake sales. However, if it keeps these papers alive and, more importantly, locally focused, it strikes me as a good direction to take.

Otherwise, I imagine it is only a matter of time before most of these local papers fold.

I got the new Evens record today, and let me tell you, I am pretty damn excited about it.

The Evens are Ian MacKaye of Fugazi fame and Amy Farina, formerly of the Warmers. Imagine Fugazi, but stripped-down and played mostly on acoustic instruments. I really can’t say enough good things about this album (likewise for their self-titled debut), aside from that fact that you should go get it right now.

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

That, my friends, is a description of a video of one of the few times Jose Padilla was allowed to leave his cell during the twenty-one months the U.S. government had him locked away in a Navy brig.

It comes from this article in this morning’s New York Times. Padilla, if you recall, was supposed to be plotting to detonate a radiological bomb when his capture was breathlessly announced by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft back in 2002. Since then, he was held as an “enemy combatant” while federal authorities interrogated him under harsh conditions. When it became clear that courts were about to determine that Padilla’s detention was unconstitutional, the government then moved him into the federal justice system to be prosecuted criminally, at which point Padilla was finally able to speak to a lawyer.

Supporters of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies tell us that this sort of thing is vital to winning the War on Terror. If we allow terrorists access to the U.S. legal system, they will simply use it against us, winning their freedom, escaping justice, and spreading their message of global jihad in the process. Protestations about civil liberties and Constitutional rights are, we are told, useless hand-wringing by limp-wristed elites who fail to understand that 9/11 changed everything.

Where to begin?

Padilla is a U.S. citizen. What the federal government has done to him over the last four years, they claim the right to do to anyone.

Sure, “Round up the terrorists and don’t give them the opportunity to escape prosecution” sounds like a great plan, but then we hear that the government has been secretly monitoring, tracking, and assigning “risk profiles” to everyone crossing the border. Or that, OOPS! We mistakenly arrested and detained a Portland, OR lawyer who actually turned out to have nothing to do with the 2004 train bombings in Madrid. And hey, how about all the people stuck on the TSA’s no-fly list for reasons no one can discern and that the government won’t reveal? And let’s not forget the people who end up on government lists for exercising their constitutional rights to free expression and assembly.

Law enforcement is not perfect, and the government is inefficient, slow, and at times Kafka-esque. While the Right would have us believe that these are the reasons we should relax the restrictions on how terrorist suspects can be treated, exactly the opposite is true. The entire point of our legal system is to give citizens a fighting chance against the huge and overpowering apparatus of the state. Giving the government the ability to detain, imprison, and interrogate people indefinitely and without the benefit of trial or accessible evidence is, frankly, insane.

As for Mr. Padilla, he is, by most accounts, incapable of defending himself at this point. The government’s case against him (such as it is) is a complete mess, a result of the endless legal shuffling to evade the courts tossing it out. Regardless of whether he is eventually found innocent or guilty, it will be nearly impossible to judge the validity of the verdict due to the government’s secrecy and opacity.

Therein lies the final indictment of the government’s strategy of indefinite, warrantless detentions—it doesn’t work.

So, let me repeat again, since this just can’t be said enough: The government wants to be able to do to anyone what it has done to Jose Padilla. And by “anyone,” I don’t just mean scary, brown-skinned Terrorists who speak a funny language and Hate Our Freedoms. I mean any American citizen—anyone who donates to the wrong non-profit, or has the same name as someone else, or whose smudgy fingerprint looks like someone else’s.

After a few weeks’ downtime, there has been something of a flurry of additions to my collection over the last week or so. Here’s what I’ve been liking:

• The Clash, Singles – This is a new box set that contains all of the Clash’s 7″ and 12″ singles. While I’m generally not a big fan of punk, the Clash took the conventions of the genre and stretched them. The Only Band That Matters? Hardly, but they were pretty damn good.
• Gang of Four, Return the Gift – If you’re a fan of all the angular, electro-punk stuff that’s making the rounds these days, Gang of Four pioneered the sound. On this album, released last year, they cover their own songs—sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it works really well here.
• Ministry, Psalm 69 – When this album was originally released in 1992, there is no way it could have lived up to expectations. Coming two years after the excellent The Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Taste and delayed several times, Psalm 69 hit the streets amidst the industrial-metal hysteria generated by Nine Inch Nails’ Lollapalooza explosion. I liked this record at the time, but I recall being rather disappointed. In retrospect, it’s a really good album—taken as a whole, it’s deeper than The Mind…, and the sound is huge.
• Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawler, Bawlers, & Bastards – This three-disc set started out as a standard collection of one-offs and rarities, but Waits ended up re-recording a bunch of the songs, as well as writing new ones. The result is 56 tracks. There are a few clunkers, but overall, this is an excellent collection.
• Isis, In the Absence of Truth – Isis is sort of the less-interesting-but-still-good companion to Mastodon, turning out tight, engaging, and modern-sounding heavy metal that isn’t just a bunch of double-base and death-grunt vocals. This album continues in the same vein as Panopticon and Oceanic, mixing crunching, occasionally crushing sound with atmospherics and broad song structures
• The Drones, Gala Mill – This album is an interesting mix of grimy rock and roll and melancholia. After several listens, I’m still enjoying it. However, with bands like this one, I’m never sure if they’ll still hold my attention a few months down the road. Definitely worth checking out, though.

Okay, this is too cool.

First, some backstory. I have close to 60GB of music sitting on my server at home. Since that box is attached to the Intarwebs and runs Apache, Mysql, and PHP, I use mp3act to serve them out. This way, I can access my music site from anywhere with a browser and a network connection, and stream the mp3′s to the local mp3 player.

There are two problems with this setup. The first is that mp3act no longer seems to be under active development. Short of learning a bunch of javascript and PHP programming (which I’m not really interested in doing), I’m stuck with the code as-is, and there are a few small but annoying bugs/quirks.

The second problem is that it’s feast or famine when it comes to graphical mp3 players for Linux. Nearly all the new players coming out are iTunes/WMP clones, complete with fancy-pants media library management, album art browsers, etc. These are way more than I need, especially given that none of my media is stored locally. On the other hand, there are a bunch of smaller, Winamp-like players, all based off the venerable X Multimedia System project. I use Beep Media Player, and while it fits my needs, it suffers (as do all of the XMMS-based players) from an exceedingly annoying habit of freezing while playing streaming mp3′s, or entirely refusing to play particular files.

Wouldn’t this be easier, I thought, if I could just browse my music directories over the network and play them that way.

That’s fine for my local network in the house—easy enough to share out the music directories with Samba and mount them in the local filesystem. Outside my house… not so much. No way I want to open Samba up to access from the public Internet.

However, I can access my server via ssh. That’s where SSHFS comes in. Using this package, I can mount the music directories on my server at home into the local filesystem on my laptop, and then use good old mpg123 to play music from the command line as though it were on the laptop’s hard drive. Better yet, because it’s using ssh, the connection to the server is encrypted from one end to the other.

As Linux stuff goes, SSHFS was remarkably easy to install and set up. Using the handy directions over at Ubuntu Blog, I had it all working in about 20 minutes. I’ve been running it for a few days now and have yet to run into any bugs or performance issues.

Now it’s on to the next project: getting MPD working.