Seems like good news to me at least:
Israel’s Defense Ministry has mapped out a new route for the separation barrier in the West Bank that heeds a Supreme Court order to reduce hardships for Palestinians and runs closer to the Israel’s 1967 border
As with all things in Israel, the Devil is in the details. But at least it’s a step in the right direction.
Good op-ed from Richard Clarke about the 9/11 commission report (yes I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about it) and how to make its recommendations even better. Key points below:
First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies – especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.
The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don’t suffer the “failures of imagination” that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.
Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.’s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the “groupthink” that hampered the agency’s ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department – a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.
I saw the report in a bookstore on Friday night but I can’t bring myself to buy it. It’s like books about the Holocaust – too painful for me to want to read them.
In a not unexpected move, an internal Army investigation has resulted in a whole lot of nothing – except for 94 reported cases of abuse and “at least” three dozen deaths.
Maybe I’m naive – I admit I know nothing about how jails are run – but I have a very hard time understanding how 36 people can die in custody and it can all be attributed to “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, and in some cases coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate supervision and leadership.”
Other points that seem to indicate that this report is a bunch of hogwash – Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the Army’s inspector general, seems to have decided to ignore some critical areas, such as the so-called ‘ghost prisons’.
Mikolashek said he found “no evidence” of so-called ghost detainees, prisoners kept off the books by U.S. forces and hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But he said he was not disputing either Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib that exposed and criticized the practice, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi prisoner held for more than seven months without notifying the ICRC.
“We did not go back and do a post mortem on that particular issue,” Mikolashek said.
As I said, none of this is unexpected. And given the proximity of the 9/11 commission’s report, this one is going to be buried.
Orcinus has a lengthy comparison of attitudes today towards Arabs with attitudes towards Japanese in the 1940s – worth a look. If you replace the word “Arab” with the word “Jap” in the materials he presents, it’s hard to tell what was written when.
Bottom line?
The reality, just as it was in 1942, is that focusing on a single race as “the enemy” is not only wrong-headed and grotesquely unjust, it’s amazingly ineffective. The United States wasted a large portion of its wartime food production by incarcerating Japanese farmers, devoted millions of taxpayer dollars to rounding them up and incarcerating them, and eventually paid billions more in reparations for having done so.
More to the point, the reality is this: It’s extremely, extremely unlikely that you will witness real terrorists in action, whether merely “warming up” or actually carrying out a plot. Suspecting someone merely because they are a different color or are acting in a way you think is unusual is almost certainly a leap of logic based in prejudice and false stereotypes.
Switching to geek mode for a moment:
After years of debate and delay, an IPv6 nameserver is finally live. For years, IPv6 had been held up as the replacement IP space for when the current supply of IP addresses runs out. That was always deemed an impractical solution because of the technical difficulty of adapting existing Internet infrastructure to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously. So IPv6 languished.
By repurposing IPv6 for next-generation Internet uses (such as putting IP addresses in appliances and cars), the question has been neatly sidestepped. It’s telling that ICANN implemented IPv6 support only for Japan’s (.JP) and Korea’s (.KR) country codes at first.
I’m looking forward to seeing what new devices or applications come out of this move.
You can’t (yet) outsource the person who actually hands the order to the customer, but you can outsource at least some fast-food jobs. The latest application of technology:
Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald’s next to the highway and you’ll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant – or even in Missouri.
The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.
At least the call center is is Colorado, not Hyderabad.
Tip of the hat to The Left Coaster for the link.