by Alex Gimarc                                Monday, November 16, 2009

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Cyber War
2. Show Trials
3. Kelo
4. Slush Fund
5. Purge
6. USNA

1. Cyber War. Shane Harris writing in the National Journal Saturday described cyber war plans in a long article. The article went on to describe the overall threat to our financial system and the fact that we as Americans aren’t in the forefront of this way to wage war (we are thought or hoped to be as good as Russia and China). It also described cyber warfare, information operations conducted against the wireless / cell phone networks used by the jihadis and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you have any interest in computer security, I would recommend the article. You can find it at the following location: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/coverstory.php Buried midway in the article was a bit about then Treasury Secretary Paulson’s concern with a cyber attack on our financial system. Paulson expressed that concern in 2007. I have long wondered why Paulson and Bernanke panicked in September 2008. The best information I can find describes the withdrawal of over $500 billion from a money market fund in Atlanta in a fifteen minute period of time as the trigger for the financial collapse last year. Over the months, I have decided that it was a Soros-orchestrated event intended to collapse the stock market and elect democrats to congress and the WH. But something made Paulson and Bernanke panic, leading to TARP and strong-arming banks and lending institutions into taking federal money. What if they misinterpreted the event and believed instead that it was a cyber war attack on the American financial system? In my mind, this would certainly explain their level of panic and concern. Of course, we have seen that federal intervention via TARP led directly to federal ownership and control of major portions of the banking system, which is a horrendous outcome. I am suggesting this explanation in no way to excuse what Paulson and Bernanke did last year. I am trying to come up with a logical reason for their panic, so that the next time we see this level of excitement, perhaps we can deal with it better.

2. Show Trials. In one of the most ignorant and self serving decisions of his short infestation of the WH, President Obama’s Attorney General announced Friday that they would be trying the 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other high level Al Qaida detainees as criminals in federal court. The trials are to be held in NYC. This is wrong on so many levels that it is difficult to begin. All five of these vermin have confessed to planning and executing the act of war against this nation while being held in Guantanamo as enemy combatants. They bragged about it. They laughed about it. In normal times, they would be tried in military tribunals, convicted and put to death via lethal injection (which according to former Attorney General Mulkasey is the same way we put down our sick dogs and cats). This nation has for over 200 years handled justice for enemy combatants via military commissions and tribunals. All that changed during the Bush administration when the SCOTUS decided to get involved in the way we conduct our wars and st arted mucking around with the care and feeding of detainees. Over the years, treatment of these enemies became a cause célèbre for the left. The Obama administration decision to try these people (and I use the term loosely for these five) in federal court is simply another step down that path. Now consider what will happen in the upcoming trials. Don’t expect them to crank up for a couple years, say late 2011. Expect a number of very high profile, high priced, leftist lawyers working either pro bono or paid by international Wahhabis to use the discovery process to go after the CIA, military intelligence, literally every clandestine technique used to capture and interrogate these five. Some of that information will be released. Some if it will not. Andy McC arthy believes that the Obama administration wants the clandestine information made public so that European Courts claiming “universal jurisdiction” will use the information to indict, try and convict most of the national security team of the Bush administration in absentia and arrest and incarcerate them should they travel outside US borders – not unlike what the Brits did to Pinochet several years ago. This decision has nothing to do with national security or even with justice. It has everything to do with the leftist intention to destroy our ability to conduct war against the Islamists and punish those that did. As such, it is a remarkably dangerous decision.

3. Kelo. A decade ago, the SCOTUS decided by a 5-4 opinion that the city of New London CN could seize private property using the excuse that what a developer was promising to build on that private property would benefit the city more than the private owners could, ie, pay more property taxes. So after a decade, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, which promised to build a research park on the land decided last week not to build that research park after all. And now the city of New London sits with cleared land that it own and nobody in their right mind is going to purchase it from them to build anything. All the homes have been cleared and the city is getting no property tax revenues from that land any more. This episode demonstrates the incredible folly of destroying private property rights and that everybody involved loses. The homeowners lost because the government at all levels colluded in common theft. Pfizer lost because it has been blamed at some level for triggering the event. The city of New London loses big because they are now left holding the bag with their ill-gotten goods that nobody will dare buy from them. And finally, the SCOTUS loses big time by overturning portions of the Fifth Amendment just so a local government wants a few more dollars in property taxes. What a terrible lesson for us all.

4. Slush Fund. Limbaugh was asked last week if the democrat majority would be able to survive the 2010 elections. He pointed out that the feds and congress today have a half trillion dollar – over $500 billion – slush fund ready and available for their use. That slush fund consists of the remaining unspent TARP funds that can be spent at the sole discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury under TARP; and the unspent portion of the stimulus money, most of which is programmed to be spent next year. $500 billion works out to roughly $1 billion per congressional seat, which is enough to bury any challenger, any conservative, or any republican under a mountain of cold cash. The only problem they will have is the inability to spend it quickly enough.

5. Purge. The Obama administration is also going after all the remaining Bush political appointees in the federal bureaucracy, retroactive to five years ago. Red State Thursday ran a story about Obama’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announcement that all political appointees will be terminated. Normally the flow for these people is to move from their appointee positions into open permanent civil service positions once the previous administration ends. It is a normal event and this back and forth has been taking place for generations. Obama intends to purge all Bush appointees completely from the federal bureaucracy. Here’s the fun p art, this memo and action opens the Obama administration up for a massive series of lawsuits from those denied promotions, the ability to compete for other positions on their merits. While I do expect him to do everything possible to attempt to co-opt and politicize the federal bureaucracy, he and his minions are somewhat constrained by federal law (at least until congress figures this out) and the constitution (which they mostly ignore). This could be a lot of fun to watch as the formal complaints from political appointees who have done their jobs quite well and are not allowed to competitively take other permanent positions within the government service will be filed early and often. One last thing is the following: if this works for the Obama-ites, it can also work for the next administration.

6. USNA. The last is a funny story out of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. This one concerns an insufficiently colorful color guard. Someone in the command chain at Annapolis decided that the members of the color guard who were going to p articipate at the World Series were not sufficiently diverse. They replaced two of the white guys with a female and a Pakistani. The Pakistani forgot his shoes and hat and himself was replaced at the last minute by one of the original guys. When news of this outrage made the rounds among the midshipmen, they were ordered not to discuss it. This is the same sort of thinking that will not allow a terrorist who kills 14 people at For Hood to be called a terrorist. PowerLine, Weds.

More later –

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.