Hope is not a plan

In a report titled Nuclear Material: DOE Has Several Potential Options for Dealing with Depleted Uranium Tails, Each of Which Could Benefit the Government, the GAO takes a look at how shifting conditions in energy markets may have transformed a giant stockpile of radioactive waste into a viable source for fuel.

The last century has demonstrated that fuel resources are not just subject to absolute limits, like finally running out of oil, but also to price pressures. Fifty years ago, it did not make economic sense to attempt to recover oil from tar sands, but these days, as easier reserves are depleted, companies are willing to pay a higher price for extraction in turn for continued supply. Similar price point issues affect the adoption of cleaner technologies such as solar and wind power. In this report, the GAO addresses how a substantial increase in the price of uranium may make it worthwhile for the Department of Energy to revisit its uranium tails, previously considered purely a waste product.

Only a very small portion of natural uranium is usable as fuel. The uranium enrichment process, used to make fissionable nuclear materials for fuel or weapons, involves separating the relatively rare uranium-235 isotopes away from their far more common uranium-238 brethren. At the end of this process, you're left with some uranium-235 to use as fuel, and some uranium-238...that still has a remnant of uranium-235 left in it that was simply too expensive to extract. This is known as a uranium tail (think of mine tailings), and although it is substantially depleted of fissionable material, it is still radioactive and toxic.

DOE currently has 700,000 tons of uranium tails.

Times, and markets, however, have changed. Eight years ago, a kilogram of uranium went for $21. Today, that same kilogram goes for $200, or basically ten times as much. As a consequence, the costs involved in extracting those extra last bits of u-235, much like the costs of extracting oil from tar sands, are now reasonable.

GAO looked at three options for DOE's handling of uranium tails. DOE could simply sell the tails and let others enrich them, DOE could enrich the tails themselves and sell the enriched product, or DOE could just sit on them and do nothing.

Briefly, the first option appears to be out (for now) because of legislation from 1996 that prevents the sale of depleted uranium. Simple as that. If Congress changed the law to allow such sales, then GAO projects that DOE would have to offer the uranium at a significant discount, to account for the financial risk the end purchaser would be taking on, based on that purchaser's need to refine the stuff.

The second option offers tremendous value -- markets and capacity depending. Based on prices at the time of the report, GAO estimated that DOE's current stock of uranium tails had a net value of $7.6 billion. That would fund quite a bit of basic energy research at DOE. Of course, this depends on the market remaining stable, and uranium prices have pitched down 40% in the last few months. That said, if prices fluctuate upward within a reasonable range, the DOE tails could be worth about $20 billion. The second issue is one of capacity. The available refining capacity in the United States is mostly spoken for, as we are in a bit of a lull in terms of capacity (with older factories going offline and newer ones not coming online for several years yet). This means that enrichment would necessarily be slow, which in turn gives the market more time to go in the wrong direction.

The "sit on them" option is problematic because it requires conversion of the tails into a form that will need to be reconverted again if DOE ever changes its mind and decides to enrich them. This adds an additional layer of cost to any eventual enrichment effort.

GAO notes that DOE has been slow about putting together a promised handling plan for the tails, and that this slowness means they have been unable to react to changing market conditions.

The report ends on this recommendation:

To determine the best options available for DOE's tails, the Secretary of Energy should complete the development of a comprehensive uranium management assessment as soon as possible. The assessment should contain detailed information on the types and quantities of depleted, natural, and enriched uranium the department currently manages and a comprehensive assessment of DOE's options for this material, including the department's authority to implement these options. Furthermore, the assessment should analyze the impact of each of these options on the domestic uranium industry and provide details on how implementation of any of these options should be adjusted in the event that market conditions change.

In this week's NATO meeting, an invite was extended to a very happy Albania, with NATO as a whole declining to fast track the Ukraine and Georgia. Foolishly and notably, Greece vetoed an invite given to Macedonia, on the basis that the name of Macedonia implies some kind of territorial claim on the northern province of Greece that shares that name.

Donald Steinberg comments on this idiocy in The Guardian, as reported here by the International Crisis Group. Some choice quotes:

At the summit, the Alliance was expected to extend membership invitations to Croatia, Albania and Macedonia, but Greece is blocking Skopje's bid due to the name issue. Athens' extreme diplomatic inhospitality towards its newest neighbour is rooted in the national indignation that another country should give itself the name of one of its own provinces, especially the one associated with Alexander the Great and Phillip of Macedonia, and fears that Skopje's use of the name implies a claim to the Greek northern province. Greece has already forced on the Macedonians the appalling moniker, "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", or FYROM, in all international forums. As if Athens would ever accept to be called the "Former Ottoman Province of Greece".

The notion that two geographic locations cannot share the same name would strike many as bizarre. Few would mistake Paris, France, for its counterpart in Texas, or Toledo, Spain, for its counterpart in Ohio. The residents of the Belgian province of Luxembourg have never been threatened by the country of the same name, nor by the Luxembourg Palace in the aforementioned Paris - France, that is. There are so many Springfields in the US that it has become an inside joke on The Simpsons.

...and...

Contrast those strategic interests with the apparent threat that Greece seems to fear. Does Athens really think that the country of Macedonia, with some two million relatively poor people, wants to take over a region in Greece, a country which is far richer and five times more populous? Do they believe that Skopje is pushing the territorial claims of Alexander and seeking an empire stretching not just to Thessaloniki, but all the way to Afghanistan and Egypt?

Glad to see that the government of Greece is doing so much to help here.

BBC article

As the Olympic torch relay moved through London, protesters did their level best to disrupt its progress, including attempts to seize the torch and to put it out with a fire extinguisher.

Chinese officials suggested that these disruptions were against the spirit of the torch relay. This, in turn, might prompt one to ask about that torch relay. Where did it come from?

Ah, yes. Nazis.

As the BBC helpfully reminds us, the very first torch relay was devised by the Nazi party ahead of the 1936 Berlin games.

"Sporting chivalrous contest," Hitler declared just before the torch was lit, "helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire."

Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but with Krupp munitions.

This is not to say that a symbol can't move beyond its origins to become something greater -- and in most years, the torch relay probably has done so. This year, however, the symbol -- like the Olympics -- is being used by another totalitarian power as a way to present itself as a modern member of the world community, even as its leaders look to suppress ethnic minorities and quash dissent.

This Wednesday, the torch will be in California. You can find its route through San Francisco here. I'll look forward to seeing whether or not it completes that route.

Following protests in London, the torch relay faced even greater opposition in Paris. Extensive protests along the entire relay line forced the extinguishing of the external torch several times, although the flame is always kept alight in a redundant lantern held securely within the relay bus. The relay eventually stopped short of its conclusion, and the planned welcoming ceremony at city hall was canceled after protesters hung a Tibetan flag and a banner depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs on city hall itself.

Chinese officials once again pulled out their 1950s playbook and hit us up with the following convincing statement:

"The Olympic flame belongs to the people around the world," said Wang Hui, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organising committee.

"So the behaviour of a few separatists would not gain sympathy from people and will cause strong criticism and is doomed to fail."

They do need to update their public statements. I might have gone with something less like, say, 1950s Communist propaganda and more like the words of IOC president Jacques Rogge:

He criticised the attempts to disrupt the torch relay, saying violent protests, "for whatever reason," are "not compatible with the values of the torch relay or the Olympic Games".

One might presume that attempting to obliterate the cultures of ethnic minorities would be out of step with the Olympic spirit as well. Although Tibet has become the main thrust of protests during the torch relay, we should recall that the Tibetans share their oppressed status with the Uighurs and, notably, with the Chinese people themselves.

The torch relay hits California, specifically San Francisco, this Wednesday.

BBC article

If you're curious about those historical documents, you can read more here. Of course, the Communist People's Republic of China turning to historical records from the Yuan Dynasty to support the idea of Tibet being a part of China is rather curious. It's not as if China is currently under Imperial control. If we run on the precedent of "the world as it was in 1300 defines modern territories," then looking at a map of Europe in 1300 we see that much of Russia must be given to the "Western Kipchak Horde" (do you have their contact information handy?), that the bulk of the Mid-east can be remanded to the custody of the "Ilkhan Empire," and that Spain must, assuredly to their disappointment, be fragmented into Castile, Granada, and Aragon.

Not to mention how much of a pain it's going to be trying to figure out who to give all the Americas back to, individually. Do you suppose we can find the Aztec leadership? No?

Not to mention the fact that a reasonable chunk of China has to be given back to the Huns. Shoot. That's just problematic. Maybe the Mongols? Also consider that the Yuan dynasty itself is actually a Chinese branding of territorial control by an outside Khanate.

It's all very confusing. I just wrote to the editorial staff at Xinhua asking if they could please explain it all so that it makes sense.

Xinhua, your source for photos of models in swimsuits and the best in incoherent propaganda.

The IMF warned today that current estimates of $400-600 billion in economic losses worldwide in the wake of the mortgage crash in the United States are likely to be well under the mark. The IMF predicts final worldwide losses on the order of $1 trillion.

The IMF releases its biannual World Economic Outlook on Wednesday and already has said it would cut half a percentage point off its forecast of 2008 global economic growth, to 3.7 per cent.

The unusually harsh biannual report, particularly critical of Wall Street, comes ahead of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in Washington over the weekend.

The IMF, whose stated mission is to maintain global financial stability, said there was a collective failure to appreciate the extent of debt taken on by a wide range of institutions - banks, insurers, government-sponsored entities and hedge funds.

Like a sort of inverse ponzi scheme in which debt is sold around in a big circle until everyone is holding onto their share of nothing, the global finance market has overextended itself and is now likely to radically overretract itself in response.

On the note of debt-laden entities, the IMF is planning a sale of 12.7% of its gold stock, an amount that should be worth about $6 billion. This sale has to be approved by quite a few member nations within the IMF, including us, so it's not yet a sure thing.

The funds from the IMF's gold sale would be used to buy US government and corporate bonds to generate income and plug a $400m shortfall in funds that is projected over the next two to three years.

This also prompted the IMF to make $100m of spending cuts from its budget over the next three years to 2011.

Notice how the previously poor countries no longer need emergency aid quite so often, as they're building up reserves. Sounds smart.

al Jazeera article

From a New York Times article that came up randomly in a general news feed:

"It's terrible," said Lily Chang, 58, an American citizen who immigrated from Shanghai six years ago and now works at a gift shop in Chinatown. "This is not political. It's sports."

Untrue.

The torch relay is strictly political. It's always, each time it happens, a political display on the part of the host nation. Most years, that's a fairly innocuous thing, the equivalent of a gigantic tourist ad for the country. "Come to Greece!" "Visit Nagano, Japan!"

This year, it's propaganda for a government that has been consistently willing to massacre large numbers of its own people to maintain control, and consequently does not blink at suppressing ethnic minorities. The Olympic year has served as an excuse to kick up the abuse of ethnic minorities and others who aren't happy with totalitarian control.

If the government of the PRC wants to use the torch and the Olympics as a political symbol, it's only reasonable to reciprocate.

Tomorrow is go day. We'll see what happens.

In a recently released report titled Defense Acquisitions: DOD's increased Reliance on Service Contractors Exacerbates Long-Standing Challenges, the GAO tests the assumption that outsourcing our defense needs to private industry saves us money.

One of the assumptions of modern day neo-cons is that private industry is automatically better and cheaper. The core concept is that competition within the marketplace will force efficiency and drive prices down, whereas a government agency theoretically has no motivation to be efficient. On the other hand, of course, a profit-driven company has a strong motivation to lowball a bid and then add charges later, to pad labor costs, and in general to do exactly what it is meant to do -- maximize profit. A government agency, on the other hand, has no shareholders, and government employees reap zero added rewards if their agency is less efficient, so they have substantially less motivation to provide incorrectly optimistic estimates and to pad expenses.

The short version of all that is to say that the modern neo-con assumption that "private industry is better and cheaper" is just that -- an assumption.

The GAO, tasked with ensuring cost-efficient operations, actually tested this assumption in the context of DOD contractors, and the relative costs of using contractors versus using government employees.

In short, they've found that private contractors cost more than their government equivalents, and introduce damaging financial risks into government operations.

Even shorter -- private contractors waste taxpayer money.

GAO has this to say on the huge risks involved in the current administration's practice of placing private contractors in charge of hiring other private contractors:

The closer contractor services come to supporting inherently governmental functions, the greater the risk of contractors influencing the government’s control over and accountability for decisions that may be based, in part, on the contractor’s work. This situation may result in decisions that are not in the best interest of the government and American taxpayer, while also increasing overall vulnerability to waste, fraud, or abuse.

What about some specific examples of contractors costing more than government employees?

To learn more about the role and cost of contractors providing contracting support services, we have recently undertaken new work to look at contractors providing contract specialist services to the Army Contracting Agency’s Contracting Center for Excellence (CCE).19 This agency currently provides contracting support to 125 DOD customers in the National Capitol Region, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Tricare Management Activity, Defense Information Systems Agency, DOD Inspector General, Pentagon Renovation Office, and Office of the Judge Advocate General. During fiscal year 2007, the agency awarded about 5,800 contract actions and obligated almost $1.8 billion. CCE is one of many government agencies that have turned to contractors to support its contracting functions.

As a part of our review, we examined how the costs of CCE’s contractor contract specialists compared to those of its government contract specialists. Our analysis indicates that the government is paying more for the contractors. At CCE, the contractors are performing the same duties as their government counterparts and have been used in this role since 2003. We compared the costs of the government employees at the GS-12 and GS- 13 levels to their equivalent contractor counterparts (referred to as contract specialists II and III) and found that, on average, the Army is paying up to 26 percent more for the contractors, as depicted in table 2.

Here's the table:

This example is one illustrative case. In another example, officials at the Missile Defense Agency told us last year that, according to their calculations, the average cost of their government employees was $140,000, compared with an average cost of $175,000 for their contractors—who accounted for 57 percent of their 8,186 personnel positions. We will continue to do work in this area.

These expenses highlight that outsourcing everything to private industry does not reduce costs. I suspect that although a core of cynical people within the current administration know this is the case and are basically lining the pockets of their friends, many people who consider themselves fiscal conservatives have accepted the concept that private industry always reduces costs without having any empirical data on which to base that claim. The GAO has provided, and is continuing to provide, evidence that this is not always the case.

As always, evidence trumps assertion. A 29% surcharge to have less accountable work that represents a greater overall financial risk to our Federal Government is not reasonable.

I just posted an overview of a GAO report highlighting how outsourcing to private industry can actually waste your money. If you'd like to write to your senators or representative about this issue, here's a possible template:

Representative/Senator [name] --

I am writing to request that you press for more GAO investigation and legislative action on the issue of outsourcing of defense department services to private contractors. A recent GAO report ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08621t.pdf ) highlighted the fact that contrary to the intuition of many, outsourcing government services to private industry often ends up costing the taxpayer substantially more money for the same service.

This empirical evidence that privatizing these services costs us money and exposes us as a country to increased financial risk should be publicized, and then acted on to ensure that we do not foolishly outsource our country into oblivion.

Thank you --

I think this one's worth writing about. The dogma of "the market fixes all" is dangerous, and people will continue to follow it despite the current economic evidence that this is not always true.

In his column today, C.W. Nevius suggests that rather than the "stealth passage" of the torch relay through SF, including its last-minute diversion, was not so much an effort to avoid protesters as it was an effort to avoid handing the publicity of a trip through San Francisco over to the Chinese government.

For all the talk of protests leading up to the Olympic torch relay, we didn't hear much from the supporters of China.

They were waving thousands of huge, red Chinese flags or holding up identical, professional-looking placards that read "Beijing, 2008, torch relay."

Quite a few members of that crowd were on my train home today, hefting both giant PRC flags and those professional placards Nevius mentions in his column.

If Newsom did, indeed, extract the torch relay from the midst of an ever more egregious planned spectacle on the part of the PRC, I'm happy to hear it. We certainly won't receive official confirmation of that anytime soon.

From this article in the S.F. Chronicle:

One galling criticism in Chinese eyes has been the comparison with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Olympic torch relay started - as a national glorification exercise under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

In response to the Hitler comparison by a Times of London writer, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said, "The Times and its journalist insulted the people of China and the world."

Conflating the government of the People's Republic of China with the Chinese people is exactly as insulting as conflating the Nazi government with the German people. In contrast, the Nazi-PRC correlation makes sense.

This week, UK politician Nick Clegg has called for the Serious Fraud Office to reopen its investigation of possible bribing of Saudi officials by the British Arms exporter BAE. The original investigation was closed after it was deemed to conflict in an unstated manner with British national security.

Clegg's call comes on the back of a High Court ruling that the original cessation of investigations in 2006 was unlawful. The Court still has the option of forcing the SFO to reopen that inquiry, whether or not that office of Gordon Brown want to.

The word now is that the unstated threat to British national security was actually a very specific threat by the Saudis to withhold information and support for British antiterrorism investigations if the BAE inquiry went ahead. The fact that the British government of the time went along with that threat displays the startling lack of proper risk analysis that often turns up when the issue in question is terrorism or extremists.

It is appalling that terrorists have been able to hit central London. That said, sixty people per million UK residents died in traffic accidents in 2004, or on the order of 3,600 fatalities, total. Likewise, influenza deaths must far outpace the overall risk of terrorist attack. Similarly with cancer and other illnesses. Thus, the heavy emphasis on counterterrorism can't possibly be purely about the numbers.

In principal, defending against terrorism is a matter of sending the concrete policy message that attacks on your citizens will not be tolerated, and that people who attempt it will forfeit their freedom and occasionally their lives. The core message must be that your people can not be messed with. The willingness of the Blair administration (of which Brown was an integral part) to bend and allow itself to be coerced by a fundamentalist state, to look the other way rather than continue a corruption investigation of a major arms exporter, says that the UK can be messed with.

Put simply, the risk to the United Kingdom of a government that can be bullied by other nations is much worse than the risk to the United Kingdom of losing a fraction of its counterterrorism intelligence.

The calculation was flawed, and the High Court ruling is correct. Corruption is more dangerous, in a real, material sense that leads to loss of lives and wellbeing, than some hiccups in already flawed intelligence.

BBC article

If you're reasonably well read on global warming, you'll already know about the low, but problematic chance that the Atlantic Conveyor could shut down, leading to catastrophic and devastating climate change that would fundamentally alter life in much of Europe, among other places.

In this week's issue of Science, Kump and Pollard address a puzzle from geologic history that brings up another potential catastrophe scenario from global warming.

Those who model climate history have long wondered at a few periods of "supergreenhouse" temperatures that can be detected in the geologic record, without concomitant carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to match. A number of hypotheses have been presented, including high methane levels, greater ocean heat transport to the poles, and so on. In their article Amplification of Cretaceous Warmth by Biological Cloud Feedbacks, Kump and Pollard posit a different cause for these temperature spikes, with specific implications for our current climate problem.

Quite recently, we've discovered that cloud formation often depends on biological materials floating in the air. As a consequence, greater biological productivity in an area can lead fairly directly to greater cloud formation overhead. At the same time, increases in temperature can depress biological productivity.

Thus, a certain increase in temperature from other causes could have led to decreased biological productivity. This, in turn, would have led to fewer clouds, and more sunlight penetrating the atmosphere instead of being reflected away by cloud cover. More sunlight would have led to more warmth, and even lower productivity, and thus even less cloud cover, and so forth. Eventually, the system stabilized and corrected, but only after a period of dramatic atmospheric heating.

Clearly, this is relevant now, and represents yet another reason that global warming is not just an incremental thing that we can scale back on at leisure. World ecology is buffered against a certain amount of change, but there are limits, and as those limits are exceeded, we can expect some kind of runaway catastrophe to occur.

Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russian oil giant Lukoil recently indicated that without major spending on new reserves, Russian oil production could be expected to fall off sharply in the next decade.

In fact, Russian oil output fell for the first time at the beginning of this year, primarily on the back of poor weather and supply issues in Western Siberia. However, the larger problem of the depletion of proven reserves is one that will severely limit Russian oil production in the near future as long as no money is directed into developing new reserves.

Analysts at Citigroup recently said annual increases in Russian output could "no longer be taken for granted" but argued that production was expected to rise until 2012.

"I believe the decline will continue for quite a number of years."

This is not strictly a peak oil issue, in that it is understood that additional oil reserves assuredly exist in Siberia. However, high taxes and a lack of financial incentives to explore for new reserves means that companies have been avoiding extra costs and simply leaning on their available oil fields. As a consequence, the Russian oil industry may hit the bottom of its collective barrel without any replacement in sight.

BBC article

I'll just quote this al Jazeera article:

A group of prominent US Jewish activists has launched a lobbying group and new political action committee in a bid to promote a new Arab-Israeli peace deal, organisers say.

The J Street lobbying group and its action committee, JStreetPAC, has an advisory council of more than 100 government officials, academics and activists, it says.

The organisation was formed to counter conservative groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and evangelical Christian organisations whose pro-Israel stances have dominated US foreign policy, the group said.

...and...

[J Street executive director] Ben Ami also criticised groups who portrayed organisations voicing a more critical line of Israel as anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.

"We're a pro-Israel organisation started by and represented by those who care about Israel and want it to survive, to be strong and safe."

Russia has been playing a tricky game with its neighbors, promoting the fragmentation of states like Georgia and Moldova while vigorously asserting that Kosovo has no right to break away from Serbia. Relations between Georgia and Russia have been especially dismal, with Russian support for two different breakaway provinces that are nominally under Georgian control, and a cold war of sorts between the states that has led to the occasional night-time stabbing of Russian "advisors" in the Abkhaz territory.

This conflict added a new note of discord this week as the Georgian government claims -- with backing video evidence -- that a Russian MiG shot down a Georgian UAV over the Abkhaz territory, and thus while clearly violating Georgian sovereign airspace. The BBC article's embedded video shows a Georgian military officer presenting the alleged video feed of the shoot down, from the UAV itself. Although one can imagine spoofing this kind of thing, the video looks authentic enough.

No one is actually disputing that the drone was shot down. Abkhaz separatists are claiming the kill for themselves, saying that they shot the drone down with an L-39. If the video is authentic, then this story is patently false, as the fighter in the video is not an L-39 (and does, indeed, look much more like a MiG.

BBC article

Late last week, a Chinese cargo ship carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe left the port of Durban in South Africa following a legal decision preventing the offload of its cache of weapons.

South Africa's government had said it could not legally prevent the arms being transported through the country but the high court in Durban ruled that the cargo could not be moved overland, though it could be discharged in the port.

The ship contains three million rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and several thousand mortar rounds, according to South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper.

The South African state-owned arms company, (not to be confused with the Philippines company of the same name) agreed to transport the weapons overland across South Africa to Zimbabwe after several private companies demurred. The South African government said that it was in no position to interfere in commerce between two sovereign nations, as there are currently no arms embargoes against Zimbabwe. That said, a number of countries (and the entire EU) have banned arms shipments to Zimbabwe.

The Chinese government, not particularly concerned about what happens in Zimbabwe but very concerned about not letting people touch its internal dealings, replied with the title quote of this post when challenged on the issue of sending arms into such an unstable nation.

BBC article

The Chinese government is having trouble lately moving things from place to place. The An Yue Jiang, freshly rejected by the dockworkers of South Africa, was reportedly making its way along the African coast, looking for a port of entry. Angola, generally friendly with China, announced yesterday that it wouldn't let the weapons shipment unload for transit to Zimbabwe.

Filomeno Mendonca, director of the Institute of Angolan Ports, said preventive measures have been taken although the An Yue Jiang has not requested to dock.

"We have warned our ports that this ship does not have authorisation to enter in Angola and therefore will not be assisted in Angola," Mendonca told a local radio station.

The latest news, however, is that the PRC is going to recall the vessel, sending a significantly smaller arms shipment by air, instead. With this, the Chinese government is clearly making a point, although the point could be anything from "we will not be messed with" through "we honor our commitments" and ending in "don't interfere in the internal affairs of other countries."

al Jazeera article

Following a High Court ruling that the Serious Fraud Office's failure to investigate BAE's bribery case was wrong, the SFO has appealed this decision. In response, they've been allowed to contest the ruling that they acted unlawfully in dropping their investigation. This appeal will be heard sometime later this year.

al Jazeera article

This week has been an especially Israel-heavy news week. Negotiations between Israel and Syria may well be on the upswing again, especially following the passing of an unofficial and yet not-quite-secret message that Israel is willing to consider giving back the Golan Heights. That might come as a bit of a shock to the thousands of Israelis now living in the Golan.

At the same time, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has publicized a 2004 letter from George Bush to then PM Ariel Sharon that Olmert claims consists of Bush giving Israel a green light for settlement expansion in the West Bank. The Bush administration has denied that the letter gave that message, and the final interpretation is clearly up in the air. That said, the cited article ends in a telling quote from Colin Powell, who was our Secretary of State at the time:

Powell said that in 2004, he did not anticipate that Bush's letter would be perceived as a green light by Israel for adding to the settlements. "I consistently spoke against settlement growth, but as you know all I could do is talk against it," Powell said. "There would be no consequences and there still aren't."

"There would be no consequences and there still aren't."

Powell certainly had the read on our interactions with and treatment of the state of Israel.

...and another American citizen is up on charges of spying for Israel.

It does become hard, over time, to justify protecting the little kid who keeps pathologically stealing your record collection, even if you're afraid his classmates are going to beat him up.

Over the last half decade, the two dumbest conspiracy stories concerning the September 11 attacks have been that either the United States or Israel were behind them, with concomitant fabricated tales about all the Jews (because they have meetings and memos, yeah?) staying home from work the day of the attacks, or there being no evidence of an airplane at the Pentagon (except the videotape of a plane hitting the pentagon, plane debris throughout the crash site, and an engine-shaped hole in the damn wall where one of the engines punched through). Many rational people have worked to debunk this stupidity while addressing real concerns like the false connections the Bush administration tried to make between al Qaeda and Iraq.

The latest round of debunking comes from, well, al Qaeda.

In what is viewed as a sign of increasing hostility between the organization and Iran, al Qaeda leadership member Ayman al-Zawahiri has posted an audio track online in which he blames Iran for spreading the idea that Israel was behind the attack, and definitively claims credit for al Qaeda.

In a two-hour audiotape posted on an Islamist website, Osama Bin Laden's chief deputy responded to questions posted by al-Qaeda sympathisers.

"Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it."

Indeed.

al Jazeera article

Former KBR employees are speaking as witnesses before a Senate committee today. You can listen along to this kind of testimony on a daily basis on C-SPAN radio on iTunes, or from their website.

Highlights so far include the escorting out of the country of KBR employees who used their internal ethics hotline (oops), and, more notably estimates from former KBR employees Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren, and Barry Halley that from 30-80% of the billing that went out from their facilities was fraudulent.

This directly matches the stories related to me by military service members who reported KBR, contracted to provide food services for a base, serving food just once a day for exactly one hour (but naturally billing for three square meals).

Again and again, we see that KBR are war profiteers who hurt our own soldiers, often despite the best efforts of good employees who sign up thinking they're going to be doing real work.

As we've seen, KBR cheats like mad on its contracts and outsourcing Federal jobs to private contractors costs us more money.

Showing that they can alienate pretty much anyone, the People's Republic of China has recently angered trading partner Russia by making home-made knockoffs of the the Russian Su-27 fighter aircraft.

An original 1995 deal between the two countries for the sale of 200 Sukhois to the PRC was structured such that all the parts for the planes would originate in Russia, then be assembled into the final product under Russian supervision in Chinese plants. Things have not gone as planned, however, with the PRC refusing Russian access to construction sites and, much more dramatically, suddenly canceling a substantial portion of their parts order in 2004. Following a series of incidents involving Chinese attempts to acquire plans and parts for the Su-27, the PRC put in a final order for engines...and then began manufacturing its own knock-off version of the Russian fighter.

Dubbed the J-11B, the fighter is clearly a Sukhoi, despite the PRC's risible claim that it's entirely home made. What does this all mean?

The Russian military industry has not made clear what legal action it will take if it is convinced that China violated Russian intellectual property rights. However, a civil aviation technology analyst based in Moscow says that the J-11B incident will surely have a major impact on cooperation between China and Russia in the aviation industry.

Russia's economic recovery in the past few years means that money is no longer the only consideration in deciding where to export its military technology.

Indeed.

UPI article

(I originally saw this in Pravda, of all places. But I can't imagine ever actually citing Pravda.)