Yesterday Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn disclosed a previously classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that North Korea could put a nuclear warhead on a missile, according to the New York Times. When I worked at the State Department, including in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, people uniformly thought that DIA's intelligence analysis was poor, except in areas such as particular tactical weapons evaluations. In strategic areas, such as nuclear weapons development, DIA always tended to overplay the threat, presumable because it meant budget money. The Pentagon needed dire threats to justify spending the huge amounts of money it wanted for its various weapons programs. Thus, it needed to build up the threatening image of the enemy, whoever it was, the old Soviets, or the new terrorists, or North Korea.
I think there probably was some collusion between Congressman Lamborn and the Pentagon. It may not just be accidental that the sentence or paragraph that Lamborn quoted was unclassified, while the rest of the report was. Somebody at DIA probably wanted to get that analysis out, and worked out a way to do it through Lamborn. But the rest of the US Government has pretty much disavowed the statement as just the unfounded opinion some crazy DIA analysts.
I don't think that even next door neighbor South Korea needs to worry about being hit by a nuclear tipped North Korean missile, although it might need to worry about a nuclear weapons delivered by some more conventional means, such as aircraft, truck or ship. In addition, North Korea probably has few nuclear weapons. Despite their flouting restrictions on their nuclear program, over the years the international pressure has slowed down their program, meaning that they have relatively little nuclear material, either plutonium or enriched uranium. Just recently they have threatened to restart the plutonium production reactor which has been shut down for years.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Jury Duty
I had to report for jury duty on Monday for the first time in my life. When I lived in Virginia, lawyers were automatically exempted, at least for part of the time that I lived there, plus I was overseas for much of my career and thus unavailable for jury duty.
I was one of the jurors initially selected for a misdemeanor trial. The judge and the lawyers asked the potential jurors a number of questions, and my reply to one surprised me. They asked how much faith we had in the American legal system on a scale from 1 to 10. I decided on 6, which made me lower than most. I chose such a relatively low number because I am unhappy with the American legal system.
I think that we are approaching a double standard for justice before the law, one for the rich and famous and one for everybody else. In particular, I'm unhappy that more people have not been brought to trial (and convicted) for the financial shenanigans that produced the banking crisis that created the "Great Recession." In addition, insider trading seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, for the rich. There have been a few trials, but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg. More and more rich people don't even trade on the public market; they trade in dark pools, where who knows what they do. They also come up with complex transactions, often through foreign markets, since much of their money is probably already in overseas tax havens. Hollywood actors may go to trial, but they seldom get convicted, and if they do, they seldom serve any actual jail time.
In theory the jury system, providing a jury of regular people, should counter this favoritism for the rich and famous, but good, expensive lawyers manage to sway jurors, who may already be overawed by the fame of the people they are judging.
I was one of the jurors initially selected for a misdemeanor trial. The judge and the lawyers asked the potential jurors a number of questions, and my reply to one surprised me. They asked how much faith we had in the American legal system on a scale from 1 to 10. I decided on 6, which made me lower than most. I chose such a relatively low number because I am unhappy with the American legal system.
I think that we are approaching a double standard for justice before the law, one for the rich and famous and one for everybody else. In particular, I'm unhappy that more people have not been brought to trial (and convicted) for the financial shenanigans that produced the banking crisis that created the "Great Recession." In addition, insider trading seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, for the rich. There have been a few trials, but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg. More and more rich people don't even trade on the public market; they trade in dark pools, where who knows what they do. They also come up with complex transactions, often through foreign markets, since much of their money is probably already in overseas tax havens. Hollywood actors may go to trial, but they seldom get convicted, and if they do, they seldom serve any actual jail time.
In theory the jury system, providing a jury of regular people, should counter this favoritism for the rich and famous, but good, expensive lawyers manage to sway jurors, who may already be overawed by the fame of the people they are judging.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Cheney's Military Service
I watched the Showtime movie "The World According to Dick Cheney," but was disappointed at its failure to challenge Cheney's views. My first objection was that it did not say anything about Cheney's failure to serve in Vietnam. It talks about how he was expelled from Yale and worked back in Wyoming as an electric lineman before resuming his education in Wyoming and then Wisconsin. This was in the 1960s, prime time for the Vietnam draft. His Wikipedia page and this Slate article describe how he weaseled out of the draft. Normally a student deferment was for only four years; Cheney got more. For his fifth deferment, he reportedly got a hardship deferment because his wife was pregnant. Wikipedia says he told that Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
I don't think that everybody who avoided the draft was a coward, but it certainly raised questions about their patriotism. I think that Cheney thought he was more important than America. Maybe he thought he was destined to save America from itself. If so, it didn't work out. The wars have probably weakened the US militarily and damaged our image abroad. The huge costs incurred without increasing taxes to pay for the wars damaged the US economy for years to come.
One new, unfavorable fact about Cheney that I learned from the movie was that toward the end of the Bush administration, he became seriously estranged from President Bush. Bush thought that Cheney had led him astray on foreign policy and defense issues, and in particular had sandbagged him on the issue of illegal wiretapping by the government.
I think it is safe to say that Cheney has no regrets because he has no heart and no conscience. While he avoided the draft as a young man, he let young men from Wyoming serve in the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it looks like only 14 from Wyoming died in Iraq.
Dick Cheney: unpatriotic coward who undermined American greatness.
I don't think that everybody who avoided the draft was a coward, but it certainly raised questions about their patriotism. I think that Cheney thought he was more important than America. Maybe he thought he was destined to save America from itself. If so, it didn't work out. The wars have probably weakened the US militarily and damaged our image abroad. The huge costs incurred without increasing taxes to pay for the wars damaged the US economy for years to come.
One new, unfavorable fact about Cheney that I learned from the movie was that toward the end of the Bush administration, he became seriously estranged from President Bush. Bush thought that Cheney had led him astray on foreign policy and defense issues, and in particular had sandbagged him on the issue of illegal wiretapping by the government.
I think it is safe to say that Cheney has no regrets because he has no heart and no conscience. While he avoided the draft as a young man, he let young men from Wyoming serve in the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it looks like only 14 from Wyoming died in Iraq.
Dick Cheney: unpatriotic coward who undermined American greatness.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Government Funding Deja Vu
The sequester episode brings to mind very bad memories of my government service. I basically quit the Foreign Service because of the government's refusal to fund things I thought it should have funded in the turmoil around the government shutdown in 1995 and 1996.
In the early years of the Clinton administration, before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans came to power in 1994, two years into the Clinton administration, the US had signed a agreement to provide funding for joint science projects between the US and Poland and other former eastern bloc countries for five years. When I arrived in Warsaw, the US had already provided $2 million funding for one year, and it provided the same amount for the second year, which was the first year of my assignment in Poland. But Congress refused to provide funding for what would have been the third year of the program.
A fairly senior Polish diplomat repeated called me into the Foreign Ministry to berate me on behalf of the United States for failing to live up to its obligations. I told him that if wanted results, he should call in the Ambassador rather than me, but at that time Poland was not yet a member of NATO, much less of the EU, and it did not want to do anything that would damage its efforts to join those organizations. So, he continued to tell me how upset Poland was at the US default. Having been raised in the South with a heavy dose of lecturing on the importance of honesty, honor, integrity, etc., the fact that I was the representative of a country that failed to live up to those standards hurt me deeply.
About six months or so after the US decision to abrogate the cooperation agreement, the Ambassador decided that the embassy had no need of a science officer, because there was little scientific activity outside of the cooperation agreement. He said that I could finish my tour, but I would not be replaced when I left. A little while after that, the State Department in Washington asked if I would be willing to transfer from Warsaw to Rome to take the science job at the embassy there. I agreed and was scheduled to leave in a few weeks.
It turned out that the day of my departure from Warsaw to Rome was the day the United States Government shut down, November 14, 1995, according to Wikipedia. My wife and I had moved everything out of our government housing in Warsaw. Most of our things had been shipped to Rome, but we had a car full of clothes and two dogs that we planned to drive to Rome. At about 4:00 pm, while I was saying farewell to some friends in the embassy, Rome called and said not to come because I had been furloughed and there was no funding for travel. However, we had nowhere to live in Warsaw and everything we owned was either in transit or in the trunk of the car.
Unfortunately, this reminded me of an experience in the Army during the Vietnam War. My artillery battery was stationed on a mountaintop at a base called Firebase Barbara, west of Quang Tri, near the Laotian border, where we were shelling the Ho Chi Minh trail. Vietnamization had started; so, we had no American infantry to defend us. Instead we had two "dusters," old anti-aircraft weapons systems that shot 40 mm rounds like a machine gun. The duster crews were always stationed in isolated, dangerous places and had a reputation of having gone native and not being very professional. One night we got an intelligence report that enemy troops were massing at the base of our mountain, apparently planning to attack us. I got a radio call from our headquarters telling us not to give the dusters any gasoline, because they were famous for not having any, and it was too hard to get it out to us. However, it looked like if the dusters could not shoot, we were all going to die. We made sure the dusters had gas; they blew away the area at the base of the mountain where the enemy was supposed to be assembling, and the attack never materialized.
But that's how it struck me -- that the US Government would rather that my wife and I freeze to death in Poland than provide us shelter. A government that sends troops into the field and then fails to provide them with ammunition and other necessities is a pretty worthless government, and that's what I thought of our government. We weren't going to die, but for all the government cared, we could have. Unfortunately, a similar attitude led to the deaths of the American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, a few months ago.
I tended to be just a soldier in the Foreign Service. I was not an outstanding diplomat. The assignment in Rome was a plum, but it had fallen into my lap. Most people who go to nice places lobby hard for the assignment. I didn't know much of anything about the personnel in Rome. I was so mad that this time, rather than be the good soldier and camp out in some hotel in Warsaw, I called Rome to complain about being left on the street. It turned out that the DCM, the deputy ambassador, was someone I knew from a previous assignment in Brazil. He said to go ahead and travel to Rome and they would figure out the paperwork somehow. I did, but that basically ended my desire to serve the US government. I would not serve a government that abandons its troops in the field.
A diplomat is many things: a journalist reporting on the country where you are assigned, a mailman carrying messages from our government to theirs, but also a salesman, both for American products and for the American way of life. When the government I was representing fell to some mean-spirited, dictatorial, third-world standard, I didn't want to represent it anymore.
I went to Rome. One reason they wanted me there was that Italy was assuming the presidency of the European Union, which meant that most of the diplomats in the embassy did double duty, they had to deal with the Italian government on the usual bilateral issues, but also on European Union issues. The presidency lasts for six months. I stayed for six months to take care of the extra work, but then retired from the Foreign Service and left.
In the early years of the Clinton administration, before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans came to power in 1994, two years into the Clinton administration, the US had signed a agreement to provide funding for joint science projects between the US and Poland and other former eastern bloc countries for five years. When I arrived in Warsaw, the US had already provided $2 million funding for one year, and it provided the same amount for the second year, which was the first year of my assignment in Poland. But Congress refused to provide funding for what would have been the third year of the program.
A fairly senior Polish diplomat repeated called me into the Foreign Ministry to berate me on behalf of the United States for failing to live up to its obligations. I told him that if wanted results, he should call in the Ambassador rather than me, but at that time Poland was not yet a member of NATO, much less of the EU, and it did not want to do anything that would damage its efforts to join those organizations. So, he continued to tell me how upset Poland was at the US default. Having been raised in the South with a heavy dose of lecturing on the importance of honesty, honor, integrity, etc., the fact that I was the representative of a country that failed to live up to those standards hurt me deeply.
About six months or so after the US decision to abrogate the cooperation agreement, the Ambassador decided that the embassy had no need of a science officer, because there was little scientific activity outside of the cooperation agreement. He said that I could finish my tour, but I would not be replaced when I left. A little while after that, the State Department in Washington asked if I would be willing to transfer from Warsaw to Rome to take the science job at the embassy there. I agreed and was scheduled to leave in a few weeks.
It turned out that the day of my departure from Warsaw to Rome was the day the United States Government shut down, November 14, 1995, according to Wikipedia. My wife and I had moved everything out of our government housing in Warsaw. Most of our things had been shipped to Rome, but we had a car full of clothes and two dogs that we planned to drive to Rome. At about 4:00 pm, while I was saying farewell to some friends in the embassy, Rome called and said not to come because I had been furloughed and there was no funding for travel. However, we had nowhere to live in Warsaw and everything we owned was either in transit or in the trunk of the car.
Unfortunately, this reminded me of an experience in the Army during the Vietnam War. My artillery battery was stationed on a mountaintop at a base called Firebase Barbara, west of Quang Tri, near the Laotian border, where we were shelling the Ho Chi Minh trail. Vietnamization had started; so, we had no American infantry to defend us. Instead we had two "dusters," old anti-aircraft weapons systems that shot 40 mm rounds like a machine gun. The duster crews were always stationed in isolated, dangerous places and had a reputation of having gone native and not being very professional. One night we got an intelligence report that enemy troops were massing at the base of our mountain, apparently planning to attack us. I got a radio call from our headquarters telling us not to give the dusters any gasoline, because they were famous for not having any, and it was too hard to get it out to us. However, it looked like if the dusters could not shoot, we were all going to die. We made sure the dusters had gas; they blew away the area at the base of the mountain where the enemy was supposed to be assembling, and the attack never materialized.
But that's how it struck me -- that the US Government would rather that my wife and I freeze to death in Poland than provide us shelter. A government that sends troops into the field and then fails to provide them with ammunition and other necessities is a pretty worthless government, and that's what I thought of our government. We weren't going to die, but for all the government cared, we could have. Unfortunately, a similar attitude led to the deaths of the American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, a few months ago.
I tended to be just a soldier in the Foreign Service. I was not an outstanding diplomat. The assignment in Rome was a plum, but it had fallen into my lap. Most people who go to nice places lobby hard for the assignment. I didn't know much of anything about the personnel in Rome. I was so mad that this time, rather than be the good soldier and camp out in some hotel in Warsaw, I called Rome to complain about being left on the street. It turned out that the DCM, the deputy ambassador, was someone I knew from a previous assignment in Brazil. He said to go ahead and travel to Rome and they would figure out the paperwork somehow. I did, but that basically ended my desire to serve the US government. I would not serve a government that abandons its troops in the field.
A diplomat is many things: a journalist reporting on the country where you are assigned, a mailman carrying messages from our government to theirs, but also a salesman, both for American products and for the American way of life. When the government I was representing fell to some mean-spirited, dictatorial, third-world standard, I didn't want to represent it anymore.
I went to Rome. One reason they wanted me there was that Italy was assuming the presidency of the European Union, which meant that most of the diplomats in the embassy did double duty, they had to deal with the Italian government on the usual bilateral issues, but also on European Union issues. The presidency lasts for six months. I stayed for six months to take care of the extra work, but then retired from the Foreign Service and left.
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