bad news for UBS
Bloomberg: June 27 — UBS AG was attempting to liquidate an $11 billion “albatross” of auction-rate bonds by selling the debt to individual investors as the market for the securities started to collapse, according to company e-mails.
Iraq War Memorial
the latest from Mike Luckovich
don’t bring a knife to a gunfight
or bad things could happen
Analysis: Gas prices likely to keep rising
UPI: WASHINGTON, May 30 — For Americans experiencing sticker shock at the gas pumps, the major question is when oil prices will drop. A year ago oil cost $62 a barrel, while at the beginning of the Bush presidency it cost $20. What happened?The brief answer to the above question is that in the short term things will only get worse, due to a perfect storm of tapped-out capacity, lack of significant new developments coming online, speculation, inclement weather and terrorism.
reports galore
- 2007 WIRETAP REPORT - from The Administrative Office of the United States Courts
- Intelligence Community Classification Guidance Findings and Recommendations Report, DNI
- Precision in the Global War on Terror: Inciting Muslims Through the War of Ideas, US Army War College’s SSI
- Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery, RAND
- 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply
- Chronic Failures in the War on Terror, From Afghanistan to Somalia, the SENLIS Council
- Memorandum Regarding Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
- Global Climate Change National Security Implications, US Army War College’s SSI
on that OBL cellphone incident
CQ: Film Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy
“Secrecy is something like forbidden fruit,” former NSA official Mike Levin says, framed in harsh light, an ominous sound track playing.
“You can’t have it. It’s classified. That makes you want it more,” says Levin. “If somebody discloses that we listen to a cell phone that Osama bin Laden is using to talk to his deputy Zawahiri who’s in Peshawar, Pakistan, this fact would do damage to the national security. So it has to be kept classified.”
Former CIA official James Bruce expands on the notorious cell phone incident.
“In 1998, there was press coverage in several newspapers [that] we had an intercept capability of Osama bin Laden’s satellite telephone communications,” Bruce says. “When that press coverage exposed that intelligence collection capability, to no one’s surprise, except perhaps of the press, we lost the ability to monitor those satellite communications of Osama bin Laden.”
It’s enough to make you fire on the newspaper delivery truck with your licensed assault weapon.
One problem: It’s not true, according to reporters who later looked into it.
“The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept. 11 commission and then repeated by the president,” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reported after Bush had harped on the theme, tying it to the loss of 3,000 lives at the World Trade Center. “But it appears to be an urban myth.”
“The al Qaeda leader’s communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 — and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time,” Kessler wrote. “The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.”
Curiously, that’s not in the film.
Getting intel CIOs on the same page
Intell CIOs assess info-sharing initiatives: “During a rare group appearance at a panel discussion in Arlington, Va., the CIOs of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency highlighted their agencies’ progress in simplifying information exchange within the U.S. intelligence community.”
nothing’s changed
No Victory, No Peace: The Saudi regime is the nursery of the Wahabi heresy that for two centuries has vied for leadership of Islam. It is also the source of the billions of dollars by which, since the 1970s, the Wahabis have spread their influence farther than ever before. Anti-American terror would hardly be conceivable without widespread Wahabi influence. The Bush team’s belief that the Saudi regime is anything other than an enemy (indeed the reason why Bush excluded the Saudis from the list of those to whom he proposed freedom in lieu of stability) is based on the supposition that the regime can control Wahabism. But the regime is Wahabism’s enabler and full partner. There is no way to stop anti-Western terror so long as Wahabism is prestigious, secure in its base, and wealthy. There is no way to make it otherwise except to undo the Saudi regime.
the Pentagon’s new map
NYT: Joint Chiefs Chairman Assails Iran’s Role in Iraq
… Adm. Michael G. Mullen, said he was “extremely concerned” about “the increasingly lethal and malign influence” by the government of Iran and the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
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“The Iranian government pledged to halt such activities some months ago,” Admiral Mullen said at a news briefing. “It’s plainly obvious they have not. Indeed, they seem to have gone the other way.”
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