I , too, assumed that the CIA had at least a few hard facts on something.
Yet there was something about those trucks that did make me stand up and say "Wait! A bunch of this stuff is probably wrong. Half these things look like they are bunch of crap."
Still, I could not imagine a US Sec of State would stand up in the UN and lie and lie and lie. I was not able to go there. "We know these things."
Circa 1988, there were articles in major papers about chemical weapons being the "the poor man's nuke" for a little extra deterrence, and Syria was high on the list of countries believed to have a bit of a stockpile. It is possible that a few shipments wandered over to Syria in 1991. But there is no particular reason to believe that anyone thought Saddam's crappy 3-4 year old chemical weapons were such a boon to treasure into the next century, when Syrian was already building its own.
It is not that the Iraq-to-Syria hypothesis has to be wrong, but the people who are so enthusiastic about it just do not know even the basics of recent history of the region. Events are easily explained without this wrinkle.
I noticed that, too. Powell had the brains to immediately sense that accepting the intelligence provided him carried a degree of risk to himself personally. Yet he could not resist sucking up to power one more time -- he had gotten very far without a spine.
Well, everyone did understand these things can happen. But the more practical problem is that backing out of a deal like this for dumb reasons underlines that US leadership is of diminishing importance. It is really really hard to accomplish much of anything except toss around some bandaids on the international scene in a measly 8 years -- presidents usually have to build on the work of their predecessors to be effective. People like Putin you can build a real long term relationship with, so why go to Washington on bended knee?
Various banks were contractually required to let Iran have their money, once certain legal hurdles were removed. That is how the rule of law works. Stealing from people you do not like, because you do not like them, is an inauspicious way to build a moral argument, most especially when the cornerstone is "they cannot be trusted".
I am glad you have caught up to what the rest of us knew in 2005. That their toes crossed some lines is something I have been assuming since forever. They have had a lot of nuclear expertise in the palm of their hands for over a decade -- worrying over what might have been going on in 2002 is pointless unless you can tie it directly to an active nuclear weapons program today.
"Facilitate the development of nuclear weapons" is a whole mouthful of weasel words put together by someone who does not know crap about nuclear technology. It is a usefully high flux of neutrons or it is not. Since it seems that it was used for medical purposes, it definitely has sufficient neutron flux that, perhaps with some degree of effort, it could be used to produce plutonium from U238. That is theoretically true about all medical neutron sources. Then there is the question of whether the geometry is actually a good design for swapping out uranium to those purposes.
I would like to see the design and I would like to see the technical analysis, but it almost does not matter what it says or what Netanyahu's papers say, because The Deal put keeping that facility away from plutonium development as a high priority. Apparently the French experts were concerned enough to negotiate hard on that point.
On this particular detail, I feel safe trusting Mossad to be correct enough, unlike you, unlike Netanyahu.
Powell wasn't lying, because he wasn't being intentionally deceptive. But it was an intelligence failure, because the facts collected by people on the ground failed to bubble up through the bureaucracy to the people making decisions.
"We know these things." Powell was lying and he knew it. He knew the work was shoddy. He knew that big portions of what he was going to tell the UN was dicey. Maybe he did not understand everything he was about to say was total crap. But so what? It was his political decision to pretend what he knew was at least mostly crap was not crap. Powell just mis-estimated how likely he was to get caught. He was mad at the time precisely because he recognized it was possible that history would remember him as a doofus because of it. Well, we do.
It is not really the kind of thing that should be a ratified treaty, anyway. That it is within Trump's power to withdraw does not make it any less stupid.
A big piece of the power of the deal is it keeps China, Russia, EU committed to maintain a nuclear weapon free Iran. The US exiting is cutting our nose to spite ourselves economically. In the long run, our partners in this deal will happily build economic ties with Iran.
You don't get it. It doesn't matter who's in office here. It only matters who's in office in Israel. The intelligence and military apparatus of Israel wanted to keep the Iran deal in place. Netanyahu wants it destroyed to help him because like Trump he's facing all sorts of legal problems for himself, and his family. It's the tail wagging the hintele.
tl;dr -- what you said
There seems to be a certain strain in thinking that massive bloodshed and destruction in the greater region is the best means of preventing any effective regional opposition to Israel to arise. Netanyahu appears to be an important cheerleader of that camp, although he is slightly careful of what he says publicly. It does result in Zionists who should know better saying out loud that the slaughter in Syria and the Iran-Iraq war are/were great things. (Such lovely humanitarians do not make a persuasive argument that Iran propping Assad is a bad thing, to my mind. But I digress...)
The Israeli intelligence community does not generally indulge in such fantasies. They worry over the popularity and recruiting rates of extremists groups -- something chaos does not help with. They worry over the more likely scenarios where a new nuclear power arises, or a new nuclear power arises unexpectedly. To those ends, The Deal is a pretty decent deal. No, it does not absolutely prevent Iran from eventually building a bomb, but it removes the most plausible paths for Iran getting one very quickly or starting to build one without it being noticed until it was too late.
In other words: Netanyahu can wrap scrapping The Deal in an Israeli flag all he wants, but that does not mean such necessarily even serves Israel's interests, much less those of the USA.
Indeed. If Tenet ever made noises about something resembling a "slam dunk", that is strong evidence of his untrustworthiness as a intelligence expert and it says nothing about the evidence.
It is conceivable to have an actual slam dunk, but that would require hard physical evidence and/or multiple sources that could be proven both independent and reliable. Some guy codenamed Curveball that the Germans have told you is probably a liar and a friend of a friend of Chalabi are not a promising foundation.
For a bit of context, 2003 is not the first gobsmacking foul up that the CIA and other intelligence services were collectively responsible for. The other big one was when the CIA told JFK in very certain terms that Castro was so hated that the island was ready to explode with countless insurrections the moment the news got around that there was armed rebellion over in the Bay of Pigs.
In the aftermath, there was a lot of introspection about how it was possible to work so hard to come to a firm conclusion that was completely wrong. The main issues were that (1) personal bias among the intelligence analysts made them prone to like a skewed subset of the data, (2) which made them blind to the fact that the people easily available to interview tended to be personally biased against Castro (the people who loved Castro do not flee to Florida), (3) which made it easy to overemphasize the importance of those isolated bits of data that painted a picture pleasing to their bosses, (4) and bosses smiling on certain kinds of conclusions cultivated group thinking that could not self-correct.
It is worth noting that Dick Cheney, in his frustration that the measly 14 existing different intelligence services scattered about the gov't were not providing the answer he wanted, created a 15th independent service under his personal supervision. And Cheney's supervision was of a style that would inevitably produce the errors described above -- the end result was practically pre-ordained.
Even the staunchest supporter of this deal will admit that Iran has a history of lying - yet supporters argue that we have to accept their [lies] or we have no deal!
The Deal has many many parts, most of which directly involve gathering evidence that Iran is complying.
So, you know less than nothing about this topic: the number of easy to disprove lies that you embrace are greater than the actual true facts you know.
According to everyone including Netanyahu, they were not building nuclear weapons. I guess you must be smarter than all of Mossad and the CIA put together. Or you are complete doofus.
Not sure what you mean. High volatility undermines the practical value of any and all currencies. I can easily accept a modest amount of inflation ordeflation if the long term trend are highly predictable.
You have to be very rich and privileged to like volatility. Normal people cannot afford to be in even medium term agreements with things like Bitcoin. If I am in a year long contract and Bitcoin drops by a factor of 2, I am screwed. If I am in a year long contract and Bitcoin jumps up by a factor of 2, I would be terrified that the business I am working with will go bankrupt. It is too often a lose-lose game.
It is not just the direct costs but also the opportunity costs. As blockchain technologies expand and mature, Bitcoin will have to compete with every other thing someone is willing to pay for that involves blockchain. Bitcoin has a big head start, but there are many reasons to suspect that Bitcoin will lose the marathon.
I think a big part of the problem is unwillingness to spend on a really really good sensor array. Being confused by stationary objects is only a thing because the computer needs to make guesses with choppy data that is not actually reliable. So, instead of making the occupants seasick with lots of popping on the brakes for no apparent reason, they try to teach the car to ignore some signals.
IMO, the advantages/disadvantages of a little inflation/deflation are overblown by both crypto fans and crypto critics. However, in a serious financial crisis, I believe the problems of deflation getting out of hand are very real, and not exaggerated at all.
Indeed. The "we are an innocent platform" defense will not work once you are accepting money. I would bet good money, the courts will be persuaded that FB is responsible for making a "reasonable" effort.
The second line of defense was that it would be too hard so doing nothing until a takedown request is received is "reasonable", which made adequate sense in 2010. With modern technology, including technology we know FB has expertise with, it would actually not be difficult at all.
"Reasonable" in 2018 is not going to go well for FB.
It is an interesting suit, because at this point in time I think it is provable that FB has sufficient technology to comply with this request to not aid fraud at miniscule direct costs. Of course, the indirect costs are what FB worries about: the cost of losing a source of sleazy revenue, the precedent being set that they could significantly reduce some kinds of fraud easily but have avoided doing so.
Certain stone arrangements could survive, but they would still need to have to been built in the right location to not be destroyed or lost beneath a changing coastline. That would pretty much be luck, though. Because there is no particular reason to believe that anyone would build with the relevant parameters in mind.
Probably overreaching lawyers, yes. Also, Everbrite might fancy themselves as possibly able to leverage that into an experience recording/selling outfit, like when you go on a cruise and get offered a DVD of "your" great memories.
I think the real motivation for this suit is not to win, but that they can get enough good quality dirt through discovery to tar the RNC with their own emails and messages.
It will be hard to claim an email is fake when the author is forced to testify that they wrote it (under the threat of a perjury prosecution).
Slashdot Mirror
I , too, assumed that the CIA had at least a few hard facts on something.
Yet there was something about those trucks that did make me stand up and say "Wait! A bunch of this stuff is probably wrong. Half these things look like they are bunch of crap."
Still, I could not imagine a US Sec of State would stand up in the UN and lie and lie and lie. I was not able to go there. "We know these things."
On your last point, probably not.
Circa 1988, there were articles in major papers about chemical weapons being the "the poor man's nuke" for a little extra deterrence, and Syria was high on the list of countries believed to have a bit of a stockpile. It is possible that a few shipments wandered over to Syria in 1991. But there is no particular reason to believe that anyone thought Saddam's crappy 3-4 year old chemical weapons were such a boon to treasure into the next century, when Syrian was already building its own.
It is not that the Iraq-to-Syria hypothesis has to be wrong, but the people who are so enthusiastic about it just do not know even the basics of recent history of the region. Events are easily explained without this wrinkle.
I noticed that, too. Powell had the brains to immediately sense that accepting the intelligence provided him carried a degree of risk to himself personally. Yet he could not resist sucking up to power one more time -- he had gotten very far without a spine.
Maybe. What tipped you off?
What does your crystal ball say about active Iranian nuclear weapons development programs today?
Well, everyone did understand these things can happen. But the more practical problem is that backing out of a deal like this for dumb reasons underlines that US leadership is of diminishing importance. It is really really hard to accomplish much of anything except toss around some bandaids on the international scene in a measly 8 years -- presidents usually have to build on the work of their predecessors to be effective. People like Putin you can build a real long term relationship with, so why go to Washington on bended knee?
Various banks were contractually required to let Iran have their money, once certain legal hurdles were removed. That is how the rule of law works. Stealing from people you do not like, because you do not like them, is an inauspicious way to build a moral argument, most especially when the cornerstone is "they cannot be trusted".
I am glad you have caught up to what the rest of us knew in 2005. That their toes crossed some lines is something I have been assuming since forever. They have had a lot of nuclear expertise in the palm of their hands for over a decade -- worrying over what might have been going on in 2002 is pointless unless you can tie it directly to an active nuclear weapons program today.
"Facilitate the development of nuclear weapons" is a whole mouthful of weasel words put together by someone who does not know crap about nuclear technology. It is a usefully high flux of neutrons or it is not. Since it seems that it was used for medical purposes, it definitely has sufficient neutron flux that, perhaps with some degree of effort, it could be used to produce plutonium from U238. That is theoretically true about all medical neutron sources. Then there is the question of whether the geometry is actually a good design for swapping out uranium to those purposes.
I would like to see the design and I would like to see the technical analysis, but it almost does not matter what it says or what Netanyahu's papers say, because The Deal put keeping that facility away from plutonium development as a high priority. Apparently the French experts were concerned enough to negotiate hard on that point.
On this particular detail, I feel safe trusting Mossad to be correct enough, unlike you, unlike Netanyahu.
Please be specific about where I am supposed to disprove the existence of leprachauns.
Powell wasn't lying, because he wasn't being intentionally deceptive. But it was an intelligence failure, because the facts collected by people on the ground failed to bubble up through the bureaucracy to the people making decisions.
"We know these things." Powell was lying and he knew it. He knew the work was shoddy. He knew that big portions of what he was going to tell the UN was dicey. Maybe he did not understand everything he was about to say was total crap. But so what? It was his political decision to pretend what he knew was at least mostly crap was not crap. Powell just mis-estimated how likely he was to get caught. He was mad at the time precisely because he recognized it was possible that history would remember him as a doofus because of it. Well, we do.
It is not really the kind of thing that should be a ratified treaty, anyway. That it is within Trump's power to withdraw does not make it any less stupid.
A big piece of the power of the deal is it keeps China, Russia, EU committed to maintain a nuclear weapon free Iran. The US exiting is cutting our nose to spite ourselves economically. In the long run, our partners in this deal will happily build economic ties with Iran.
You don't get it. It doesn't matter who's in office here. It only matters who's in office in Israel. The intelligence and military apparatus of Israel wanted to keep the Iran deal in place. Netanyahu wants it destroyed to help him because like Trump he's facing all sorts of legal problems for himself, and his family. It's the tail wagging the hintele.
tl;dr -- what you said
There seems to be a certain strain in thinking that massive bloodshed and destruction in the greater region is the best means of preventing any effective regional opposition to Israel to arise. Netanyahu appears to be an important cheerleader of that camp, although he is slightly careful of what he says publicly. It does result in Zionists who should know better saying out loud that the slaughter in Syria and the Iran-Iraq war are/were great things. (Such lovely humanitarians do not make a persuasive argument that Iran propping Assad is a bad thing, to my mind. But I digress...)
The Israeli intelligence community does not generally indulge in such fantasies. They worry over the popularity and recruiting rates of extremists groups -- something chaos does not help with. They worry over the more likely scenarios where a new nuclear power arises, or a new nuclear power arises unexpectedly. To those ends, The Deal is a pretty decent deal. No, it does not absolutely prevent Iran from eventually building a bomb, but it removes the most plausible paths for Iran getting one very quickly or starting to build one without it being noticed until it was too late.
In other words: Netanyahu can wrap scrapping The Deal in an Israeli flag all he wants, but that does not mean such necessarily even serves Israel's interests, much less those of the USA.
Indeed. If Tenet ever made noises about something resembling a "slam dunk", that is strong evidence of his untrustworthiness as a intelligence expert and it says nothing about the evidence.
It is conceivable to have an actual slam dunk, but that would require hard physical evidence and/or multiple sources that could be proven both independent and reliable. Some guy codenamed Curveball that the Germans have told you is probably a liar and a friend of a friend of Chalabi are not a promising foundation.
BTW, I appreciate the thoughtful post. Thank you.
For a bit of context, 2003 is not the first gobsmacking foul up that the CIA and other intelligence services were collectively responsible for. The other big one was when the CIA told JFK in very certain terms that Castro was so hated that the island was ready to explode with countless insurrections the moment the news got around that there was armed rebellion over in the Bay of Pigs.
In the aftermath, there was a lot of introspection about how it was possible to work so hard to come to a firm conclusion that was completely wrong. The main issues were that (1) personal bias among the intelligence analysts made them prone to like a skewed subset of the data, (2) which made them blind to the fact that the people easily available to interview tended to be personally biased against Castro (the people who loved Castro do not flee to Florida), (3) which made it easy to overemphasize the importance of those isolated bits of data that painted a picture pleasing to their bosses, (4) and bosses smiling on certain kinds of conclusions cultivated group thinking that could not self-correct.
It is worth noting that Dick Cheney, in his frustration that the measly 14 existing different intelligence services scattered about the gov't were not providing the answer he wanted, created a 15th independent service under his personal supervision. And Cheney's supervision was of a style that would inevitably produce the errors described above -- the end result was practically pre-ordained.
Even the staunchest supporter of this deal will admit that Iran has a history of lying - yet supporters argue that we have to accept their [lies] or we have no deal!
The Deal has many many parts, most of which directly involve gathering evidence that Iran is complying.
So, you know less than nothing about this topic: the number of easy to disprove lies that you embrace are greater than the actual true facts you know.
According to everyone including Netanyahu, they were not building nuclear weapons. I guess you must be smarter than all of Mossad and the CIA put together. Or you are complete doofus.
Not sure what you mean. High volatility undermines the practical value of any and all currencies. I can easily accept a modest amount of inflation ordeflation if the long term trend are highly predictable.
You have to be very rich and privileged to like volatility. Normal people cannot afford to be in even medium term agreements with things like Bitcoin. If I am in a year long contract and Bitcoin drops by a factor of 2, I am screwed. If I am in a year long contract and Bitcoin jumps up by a factor of 2, I would be terrified that the business I am working with will go bankrupt. It is too often a lose-lose game.
It is not just the direct costs but also the opportunity costs. As blockchain technologies expand and mature, Bitcoin will have to compete with every other thing someone is willing to pay for that involves blockchain. Bitcoin has a big head start, but there are many reasons to suspect that Bitcoin will lose the marathon.
I think a big part of the problem is unwillingness to spend on a really really good sensor array. Being confused by stationary objects is only a thing because the computer needs to make guesses with choppy data that is not actually reliable. So, instead of making the occupants seasick with lots of popping on the brakes for no apparent reason, they try to teach the car to ignore some signals.
IMO, the advantages/disadvantages of a little inflation/deflation are overblown by both crypto fans and crypto critics. However, in a serious financial crisis, I believe the problems of deflation getting out of hand are very real, and not exaggerated at all.
Indeed. The "we are an innocent platform" defense will not work once you are accepting money. I would bet good money, the courts will be persuaded that FB is responsible for making a "reasonable" effort.
The second line of defense was that it would be too hard so doing nothing until a takedown request is received is "reasonable", which made adequate sense in 2010. With modern technology, including technology we know FB has expertise with, it would actually not be difficult at all.
"Reasonable" in 2018 is not going to go well for FB.
It is an interesting suit, because at this point in time I think it is provable that FB has sufficient technology to comply with this request to not aid fraud at miniscule direct costs. Of course, the indirect costs are what FB worries about: the cost of losing a source of sleazy revenue, the precedent being set that they could significantly reduce some kinds of fraud easily but have avoided doing so.
If termites are such a problem, I will have a lot of trouble hacking it with my sonic screwdriver.
Certain stone arrangements could survive, but they would still need to have to been built in the right location to not be destroyed or lost beneath a changing coastline. That would pretty much be luck, though. Because there is no particular reason to believe that anyone would build with the relevant parameters in mind.
Probably overreaching lawyers, yes. Also, Everbrite might fancy themselves as possibly able to leverage that into an experience recording/selling outfit, like when you go on a cruise and get offered a DVD of "your" great memories.
I think the real motivation for this suit is not to win, but that they can get enough good quality dirt through discovery to tar the RNC with their own emails and messages.
It will be hard to claim an email is fake when the author is forced to testify that they wrote it (under the threat of a perjury prosecution).