Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
In late 1986 Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, told then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, "Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels." Soon Gorbachev began the Soviet withdrawal from its Afghan misadventure. Eight years into our own war in Afghanistan the Soviet commander's words ring eerily familiar.
The President's stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace.
The flooding which nearly wiped the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, La., off the map after Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers failing to maintain a navigation channel through the city, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
An Iraq war veteran once told me he thought his Veterans Administration doctor was trying to kill him. It seems the latest VA cost-saving trick is to try to frighten veterans to death.
The U.S. military paid just under $1 million for two 19 cent flat washers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If "Truth is treason in the empire of lies," as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) writes in his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, then Paul has certainly committed treason by laying out the truth of the precarious state of the United States in 2008.
One of the requirements for a totalitarian police state is a system of kangaroo courts, star chambers which operate in secret and in parallel to the existing judicial system to convict political prisoners of pretended crimes against the state, which could never survive in the regular courts. And former judge Michael Mukasey, nominee for U.S. Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzales, has proposed that the United States adopt such a system of courts.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include spying, spying and more spying.
Getting security right is a challenge for the best of us. But when you put security in the hands of government, getting it right is a virtually insurmountable obstacle. Here are a few ways government made you less secure and wasted your money over the last couple of weeks.
With a groan of pleasure akin to torment, George surged into the Fertile Crescent again and again.
The military desperately needs Arabic linguists in order to provide translation services in the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But at least one Navy linguist is no longer providing those much-needed services, because, for some in the Pentagon, there's a war more important than the war on terror.
For those who doubted that Rep. Ron Paul was a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the debate Tuesday night in South Carolina put all doubts to rest. Paul stirred up a firestorm of controversy for suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security made national security even more inefficient after September 11 than before, and especially for his assertion that U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades contributed to the rise of Islamic terrorism.But viewers at home responded, putting Ron Paul in second place in FOX's own tamper-proof viewer poll.
Citing operational security and bandwidth usage concerns, the Department of Defense said Monday that access to 13 popular file and video sharing and social networking Web sites would be blocked from all DoD computers worldwide.
An officious bureaucrat with the U.S. Army has tried to intimidate the Federation of American Scientists into removing from its Web site a copy of the Army's recently updated regulation on operational security. And FAS government secrecy project director Steven Aftergood told the bureaucrat in no uncertain terms to get lost.
Noah Shachtman reported Wednesday at Wired News that new Army regulations would severely restrict soldiers' ability to maintain web logs and send personal email, requiring them to clear every single post with a commanding officer. The Army says that's just not true and that nothing has changed for soldiers on the ground.
The United States Census Bureau turned over names and addresses of American citizens of Japanese descent to the Secret Service during World War II. How dare those supposedly patriotic Americans not turn themselves in to their designated concentration camps!
In case you haven't noticed, there haven't been any posts here in several days. This is primarily because I've been wrapped up with another project which has taken up virtually all of my time since the last post. To make it up to you, I'm just going to give you links to several interesting items in my unread list for you to enjoy.
Governments can't always find new and creative ways to lose your personal information, try as they might. So when they can't, they resort to the tried and true. Here are three incidents where government displayed at least some creativity while putting you at risk.
With each presidential election the candidates seem more proscribed and the selection process more truncated. Inner party poopers, talking heads and big money try to seal the deal before the ink is dry on the last guy. This time the dumb beats loudest for Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Hillary and Rudy are more alike than they're different.
Most Americans, not knowing any better, think "universal health care" is a really good idea. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. To see exactly what American universal health care will look like, one needs look no farther than the smaller version of universal health care which already exists.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) drew a crowd of 150 supporters to Pembroke, N.H., late Saturday night to support his potential bid for the Republican Presidential nomination.The fundraising reception, organized by a supporter and held at a private home, raised over $14,000 for Paul's campaign.
"We're being warned on television about people going through your identity documents and so forth," Bevan Bullock, a British pensioner, told the BBC. "The government are now giving them out willy-nilly."
We learned over the last week that hackers and thieves have made off with thousands of individuals' most sensitive personal information from government and government-related sources.
You still think your personal information is safe in the hands of the government? Think again. Every time they come up with a way to keep your information secure, they also come up with a more creative -- or more stupid -- way to lose it. And now, the government can lose your personal information even if you never gave it to them.
There are actually a few things the government is good at. Misusing, abusing and especially losing your personal information rank high on the list. Sometimes they don't even bother losing it; they just put it up on the Internet for anyone to download. Here are a few incidents from last week in which government lost, had stolen and gave away your personal information.
Local police departments are outfitting themselves with the latest in military gear they'd never be able to afford themselves. But they aren't paying a dime for their shiny new and slightly used helicopters and tanks. You are.
The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour -- when decisions are hard and courage is needed. We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies -- and the wisdom to face them together.
A military intelligence database contained 186 reports of "anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S.," according to a Pentagon memo released by the American Civil Liberties Union Wednesday. At the same time, the ACLU released a report which shows that while it obtained copies of the intelligence reports, it utterly failed to read them.Little of this is news. The only thing really newsworthy here is how much the ACLU likes to make noise without actually doing anything constructive.
The Department of Defense will remove some personal information about high school students from a military recruiting database and shorten the amount of time it keeps the information, a civil liberties group announced last week.
Over the weekend I took a brief look at the mass media's coverage of the Iraq war, posting eight satirically captioned photos of soldiers playing with Iraqi children. I've been monitoring the response to these photos all over the Internet, and across the political spectrum, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, both from conservatives and surprisingly from most liberals as well. But a few people misunderstood the point of the posting, or just don't have a sense of humor, and their responses were scathing.
On Saturday, a source in the Army in Baghdad was able to find a computer with functioning e-mail and sent out eight shocking images of U.S. troops doing unspeakable things to Iraqi citizens. After carefully reviewing the images, I am convinced there is a compelling public interest in publishing the images.Parents are cautioned that these images, as the source who obtained the photos said, "are graphic and may cause a physical reaction."
In June, the Future of Freedom Foundation will host Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, a four-day conference examining the intersection of these two burning issues, with an eye to restoring the limited-government principles on which the U.S. was founded.There's just one small problem.
It's no secret that I'm no fan of the war in Iraq. It was based on a flawed premise and, as far as I can see, has degenerated into a quagmire just short of civil war. And it's been a colossal waste of money, thanks to the Department of Defense's complete inability to keep a proper set of books.Yet the people over there waging that war are fighting a dangerous enemy which wants to kill not only them, but eventually, the rest of us.
Running a Web site like this, I get a lot of strange e-mail. And I don't mean the spam, though some of that is pretty strange. I also get a wide assortment of hate mail, though less of it than I'd expect. A couple of things that came in lately, though ...
The Department of Defense is engaging in yet another war -- this time, against binge drinking. And it's called in reinforcements to wage a propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of the population, its own servicemembers.
Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include a successful national security whistleblower, a whistleblower in trouble, and -- Look! A terrorist!
If you have a remote controlled garage door opener, you may need to get it replaced, and soon, before the military rolls out its new Land Mobile Radios which interfere with them.
If you disagree with the policies of the U.S. government, or are a member of a group or association which expresses disagreement with government policies, an agent of the federal government is likely reading your web site and subscribed to your mailing list.Undercover officers of the Federal Protective Service subscribed to the mailing lists and monitored Web sites of peaceful anti-war groups, and contributed information about those groups' activities to a military intelligence database, according to Pentagon documents released Tuesday.
Here are three short updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity. We've got good news and bad news. First, the good news.
I'm not generally much into posting things I receive in my e-mail, but this one struck me as all too appropriate. These things need to be said. They need to be heard. They need to be understood. Before the people find themselves in a brightly lit, cold prison cell.
The military intelligence unit responsible for spying on Americans had to evacuate its Fort Meade, Md., offices Friday after a six-alarm fire broke out.
The Air Force A-10 close air support jet is what goes in when soldiers on the ground call for air support. But most of the 356 jets in service have radios that have trouble communicating securely with ground troops, while a $60 million radio upgrade has been put off due to budget constraints.The Air Force only has 63 newer radios for the jets which can communicate securely without a three-to-five second delay that could result in a friendly fire incident, Air Combat Command officials said.
A peaceful anti-war protest conducted April 30, 2005, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was incorrectly listed in a Defense Department intelligence database as a potential terrorist threat, and the problems with the database corrected, a DoD spokesman said Thursday.
Congress has passed a bill authorizing the use of military commissions to try people suspected of terrorism and providing for restrictions in how such a person might defend himself against the charges.
A classified report prepared by the nation's intelligence agencies said that the war in Iraq has become the means by which Islamic extremists recruit the next generation of terrorists, and that the threat is increasing, not decreasing.
A Defense Department inspector general's report released Thursday said that there is no evidence to indicate that the Able Danger intelligence program run by the Pentagon had identified Mohammed Atta or any of the 9/11 hijackers prior to September 11. But the report drew sharp criticism for numerous "distortions."
National security whistleblower Michael De Kort, who made waves last month when he posted a 10 minute video on YouTube detailing security problems with the U.S. Coast Guard's Deepwater program to rehabilitate older ships, has posted a second video providing updates and further information on the investigation into the disclosures he made.
The Bush administration has been engaging in an Orwellian tactic known as doublespeak in its justification for the global war on terrorism, according to a paper published by the Cato Institute last week.
Has anyone seen Osama bin Laden? The U.S. government can't seem to find him or his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.The trail has gone "stone cold," it seems, and the U.S. has no idea where they might be.
President George W. Bush on Wednesday confirmed the existence of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency which held terrorist suspects who have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and called on Congress to pass new legislation authorizing military tribunals for terrorists.In addition, the White House on Tuesday released its updated National Strategy for Combating Terrorism.
We all know that countries like China, Singapore, North Korea, as well as organizations such as the U.S. military, the State of Kentucky, and various corporations, local school districts and public libraries censor their Internet users' web surfing. Bennett Haselton of Peacefire has a solution he calls the Circumventor.And to bring in more Circumventor users, Peacefire is paying $10 per IP address to anyone who installs the anti-censorship software and leaves it running for at least a week.
The U.S. military in Iraq has issued a $20 million, two-year contract to provide what they see as an essential service: a public relations program that seeks to "promote more positive coverage of news" from the region.
A coalition of national security whistleblowers says that Congress is finally set to pass important protections for whistleblowers who report internal threats to national security, but that the Department of Justice wants the desperately needed protections dropped.
Six men suspected of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia, were brought to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002. They remain imprisoned there even though the charges against them were dropped.
If you visited a Veterans Administration medical center in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, Pa., anytime within the last four years, a VA contractor has just lost your personal information. Again.
Montgomery County, Md., police arrested two teenagers Friday night and charged them with stealing a laptop from a Department of Veterans Affairs employee's home, which had become the largest personal data breach in U.S. government history. Authorities said that the theft, which highlighted poor computer security practices at the Department of Veterans Affairs, appeared to be random and unconnected to the data on the laptop.
Would you like to start your own army, or perhaps terrorist organization, but can't quite get hold of all the materials you need? Looking to build weapons of mass destruction but the parts for your chemical factory are too hard to find? Not to worry, for now you can buy just about everything you need.From the U.S. Department of Defense.At pennies on the dollar.
Since I haven't done this in a while, and a few things are piling up, here are some updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.And what better to start with than Boston's biggest boondoggle, the Big Dig.
The United Nations Small Arms Review Conference, which was derided by the National Rifle Association and other groups as an attempt to seize Americans' guns, ended Friday in failure, with some member states complaining that others blocked a consensus on control of illegal trade in small arms.
The U.S. Navy is launching a probe to determine how the names and social security numbers of 100,000 Navy and Marine Corps aviators and air crew wound up on a public Web site for six months.While the information had been on the site since December, it was not discovered until Thursday.
The U.S. Air Force, completely bogged down with information overload trying to read every blog in the world, will pay $450,000 to Versatile Information Systems Inc. to have the company develop a means of sorting out the most important new information being posted to weblogs.
A National Security Agency program to provide advanced cryptography for use by the Department of Defense and other government agencies, begun in 1999, has been delayed to at least 2012, with most of the substantive security improvements being delayed as far as 2018, according to a Baltimore Sun report Sunday.
A little known provision buried within the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools receiving federal funding to provide military recruiters with student information, including names, telephone numbers and addresses.The Pentagon's database includes birthdates, Social Security numbers, courses and majors, grade point averages, email addresses and ethnicity for high school and college students.
Following on from the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday that Bush's proposed military tribunals were not currently legal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has issued a response detailing his opinion.Not surprisingly, he condemns the ruling.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military tribunals held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba were not legal, and that the Bush administration was overstepping its legal boundaries in allowing them. In a 5-3 ruling, Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion with Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter, and ultimately decided that the tribunals violated military justice law, the Geneva convention and 2005's Detainee Treatment Act.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson announced Thursday that the government had recovered a stolen laptop which contained personal information for over 26 million veterans and active duty military personnel.
Spreadsheets containing the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of 28,000 U.S. Navy personnel and family members were found on a civilian Web site, the Office of Naval Personnel said Friday.Are you sensing a pattern yet?
Total Information Awareness was a post-9/11 Defense Department research program, written about publicly when it was introduced, to sift through and analyze vast amounts of information looking for potential signs of terrorist activity. The program was even to include security against abuse and privacy protections. But when Congress got wind of it, it stopped authorizing funds for the program.That's when it went underground, so to speak, and the security and privacy protections were thrown out.
In a case of closing the barn door after the cows have all gotten out, the Veterans Administration took steps to get its information security in order Friday, a half decade after security alerts were first issued and nearly two months after the largest personal data breach in U.S. history.
Data on a VA laptop stolen May 3 from an analyst's home may include as many as 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 Reserve members constituting nearly 80% of the active duty force as well. Some of those records included information about active duty personnel's spouses and family members. These records could be used to target military members deployed overseas or their families at home.
The practice of remembering and honoring those who have fallen in our wars remained largely unchanged for generations, until government mucked things up in 1968 by passing the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Today, we show our appreciation by beginning our school children's summer vacations, sleeping late on Monday morning and spending the week traveling to the nearest water park when we should be honoring their sacrifices.
Veterans Administration officials told Congress on Thursday that a department employee had been routinely taking home data on over 26 million veterans for over three years before it was stolen from his house in an apparent burglary May 3.
The federal government is a slow, stupid, plodding bureaucracy which can't respond quickly to anything. And if you're counting on them to save you when the next hurricane hits, you may well find yourself dead. A Department of Defense official told Congress Thursday that DoD and Homeland Security need as much as a week to prepare to respond to a major disaster. And those of you living in hurricane territories will immediately recognize exactly how stupid that is.
After the release earlier this month of five ethnic Uighurs who were being held in Guantanamo Bay despite not being enemy combatants -- or involved with terrorism at all -- four more people known to be innocent remain imprisoned there.
The Department of Veterans Affairs reported Monday that a laptop computer containing the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of over 26,000,000 veterans was stolen from the home of an employee who had taken the data home without authorization.
Updating stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity in computer security, worker identification, and smoking bans.
The President hath spoken: Let there be border security. At those words, hundreds of people in Washington jumped up and began preparing to do their part to stage what will become at best border security theater, and at worst a border security nightmare.
I don't often do breaking news, but this is important. The Pentagon has finally released the videotapes from outside the Pentagon which show United Flight 77 crashing in to the building. If you were watching FOX News an hour ago, you probably already saw them.
President George W. Bush went on prime time television Monday night to talk about immigration reform. "We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration, and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly, and fair," he said. So he proposes to send the National Guard to patrol the border, a task for which they are ill-prepared and not at all trained.
Since being fired from the National Security Agency a year ago, former intelligence officer Russell Tice has spent his time asking Congress for a hearing on what he says are "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" he observed being conducted by the NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency. On Wednesday, he will finally get his hearing.
Five ethnic Uighurs who had been captured in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay by the U.S. military after being declared not enemy combatants were released to Albania on Friday, ending a protracted court battle over their continued detention.
If you're a terrorist leader, one would expect you know how to do simple things like operate a rifle, and one would expect that the people around you would also know how to handle their weapons. Not Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In video captured by U.S. forces and released Thursday, al-Zarqawi is seen struggling to operate an American-made M249 rifle, while his aides do stupid things such as grab the rifle by its barrel and burn themselves.
Long-standing problems in the Defense Department's payroll systems have resulted in thousands of soldiers being underpaid or overpaid while serving in the global war on terrorism. But the military's focus seems to have been on those who were overpaid, as thousands of soldiers who returned home found the Army -- or collection agencies -- going after them for debts they frequently didn't even know they owed. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) called it "financial friendly fire."
Marine SSgt. Daniel Brown, who had just returned to the U.S. from eight months in Iraq, was delayed from his final flight home Tuesday because his name appeared on a Transportation Security Agency "no-fly" list.
Welcome to the 40th weekly Carnival of Liberty! As always, the Carnival is full of amazing attractions with fun-filled adventure for the whole family.This is the first time the Carnival has been here at Homeland Stupidity, and I have to say that the hardest part of hosting the Carnival was keeping all of these excellent posts hidden away until Tuesday. And now that they're here, come one, come all, and enjoy the Carnival!
Of some 13,000 entries in a classified Defense Department database used to track threats against military assets, almost two percent, or 260, were either wrongly retained or never should have been reported in the first place, according to a DoD memo dated March 30.
Vice President Dick Cheney will go skeet shooting at the Quantico Shooting Club on the Quantico Marine Corps Base today, Homeland Stupidity has learned.
So much stupidity happens every day that sometimes it's hard to keep up. I frequently have more stories than time to post them. Here are a few things that happened in the last week. Some are noteworthy, some are funny, and all are just plain stupid.
On September 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came right out and identified one of the biggest threats to national security. He said, "It's really about the security of the United States of America. And let there be no mistake, it is a matter of life and death." And after September 11, that great threat to national security got swept under the rug.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scrambling to complete rebuilding of levees in and around New Orleans which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina six months ago. But critics are saying that the Corps is using substandard materials and ignoring levees with structural damage, which will leave the city with even less protection than it had last year.
If you've been paying more than the least bit of attention, you know the American mass media is virtually ignoring anything coming out of the war in Iraq that might come close to the level of good news. In order to get such news, you have to turn to alternate sources, such as military blogs. And behind those military blogs, making sure the good news continues to flow, is Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.
High profile Web sites, such as Boing Boing and Wonkette, are finding that visitors from such diverse places as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and, er, U.S. military bases in Iraq, can no longer access their sites.The blocking of all three sites has a common thread. In fact, if you have a Web site, it's likely your site is tied into this, too.
Even while Google presents a public image of vigorously protecting its users' privacy, it has quietly provided assistance to several U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, as the U.S. prosecutes its war on terrorism. In addition, Google may be providing assistance to the National Security Agency.
I've got a couple of quick updates to news previously covered here.
I'm currently reviewing server logs for times which Homeland Stupidity has been unavailable to determine if denial of service attacks have been launched against this site. About an hour ago, the load average of the system shot up to over 40 (under normal service, it's less than 0.1). This means, in non-technical terms, that someone or something hit the site and hit it very hard. Because I happened to be watching at the time, I was able to stop the service briefly and thereby stop the attack.The surprising part is who caused this evening's brief outage. It wasn't terrorists; it was a major U.S. defense contractor.
Yesterday the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations held hearings on whether national security whistleblowers have enough protection against retaliation and whether they have sufficient process to be able to report wrongdoing in their respective agencies. Some very interesting things came out of the hearings.
The federal government owns too much property, and it's costing you billions of dollars.
Updated On Tuesday afternoon the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations will hold hearings on whether national security whistleblowers have enough protection against retaliation. Among those testifying at the hearing are National Security Agency whistleblower Russell Tice and Abu Ghraib whistleblower Army Spc. Samuel Provance.
President George W. Bush said Thursday that the terrorist who masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks also planned a similar attack on the Library Tower building in Los Angeles, Calif., but that the attack was thwarted and the terrorist captured before he could carry out the plan.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
Gardner Goldsmith explains why claims by politicians that consumers can become "irrational" and why claims by the same politicians that government can help "fix" markets are both false and misleading. He also explains what the terms Praxeology and Epistemology mean, which is key in understanding how to place free markets in their proper place among human history.
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