And While They Were Going After bin Laden, They Found Time to Kiss Up To The Banks…

This awful policy is driven by a desire for campaign donations.

The New York Times has an editorial excoriating the Obama administration for deregulating foreign currency swaps:

A loophole in the law — which the bankers and their friends, including the administration, fought for — allows the Treasury secretary to exempt the instruments. The arguments in favor of exemption, beyond a desire to please the banks, were always unconvincing. They still are. The Treasury Department has asserted that the exempted market is not as risky as other derivatives markets, and therefore does not need full regulation.

That claim has been disputed by research, but even if it were true, it would be a weak argument. For instruments to be relatively safer than the derivatives that blew up in the crisis, necessitating huge bailouts, hardly makes them safe. Worse, dealers could probably find ways to manipulate the exempted transactions so as to hedge and speculate in ways that the law is intended to regulate.

……

The department has also said that because the market works well today, new rules could actually increase instability. That is perhaps the worst argument of all. It validates the antiregulatory ethos that led to the crisis and still threatens to block reform.

The Treasury’s plan will be open for comment for 30 days. Count us opposed.

(emphasis mine)

There can be a fine line between regulatory capture and corruption, and I am not sure on which side this falls.

In a way, this is worse than Bush and His Evil Minions^™, because W was (correctly) perceived as a radical, but the actions of "Team Geithner" now firmly entrenched this thinking on both sides of the aisle.

H/t Paul Krugman for the graph pr0n.

You Know That if There is News, Republicans Will Lie About It

They are now claiming that torture got us Osama bin Laden, but it's a lie.

The sources in Gitmo gave information after 2006, but they were all tortured before 2005, meaning that the information was obtained through more ethical methods:

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

With al-Libi, the connection between whatever torture he experienced and this intelligence is less clear (since he was first detained in 2005), but even with al-Libi, it appears clear he either never revealed the courier’s real name or only did so after he had been in custody for a year, and almost certainly until after he arrived in Gitmo.

Update: Putting the AP’s reporting here together with the DAB, it seems like al-Libi did give up the name, perhaps earlier than reported. But still not waterboarding.

Expect more lies from Republicans on this, because this is what they do.

Your bin Laden Update

The most interesting bit is the dog that did not bark, one of the red flags that tipped off the CIA was the fact that a rather expensive, on the order of $1 million, but there were no phone lines or internet connectivity.

After the Moonie Washington Times revealed that we were monitoring his satellite phone in the 1990s, we went old school on his communications, using only couriers, and so, when he set up his homestead a mile from the Pakistani military academy (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?) he was having none of telecommunications thing, and that lack marked him.

On the truly weird side, it turns out that the raid was life tweeted by someone (@ReallyVirtual) who was unaware of the raid, and was just complaining about the helicopters late at night.

There is a bigger picture, but that's the next post.

Can We Get the F%$# Out of Afghanistan Now?!?!?!?

Osama bin Laden is dead.

According to reports, this has been confirmed by DNA tests, and it appears to have been an on-ground operation and firefight, not a drone strike, in Pakistan.

Deep Thought

In case you do not recognize the picture, this is Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

N/t Neophyte at the Stellarparthenon BBS.

Ha Ha!

Anonymous has apparently penetrated the US Chamber of Commerce, and now released a 1.2 Gigabyte file containing the documents.

It seems to contain files from the Chamber, the American Legal Exchange Council, and the the Mackinac Center.

The last two are right wing front groups.

The ALEC writes legislation to kill unions as well as the poor and the elderly, and the Mackinac Center is yet another of those right wing so-called "think" tanks.

There is a caveat here, one which has been posted at AnonNews:

On April 29th a person using the twitter account “@septscelles”  released a large file to Barrett Brown that purportedly contained secret US Chamber of Commerce documents. This file was later made available via File Dropper as a (strangely truecypted) torrent named "chambersecrets2".  It is also reported to have been made available in an unencrypted form on the Pirate Bay.

Despite the promise of secrets and leaks, early research has thus far shown that this information is publicly available through a simple Google search. It's very possible that “@septscelles” is just an attention seeking troll. Despite this, there is a more insidious possibility. We learned from the HB Gary emails that the Chamber of Commerce was advised to “feed the fuel between the feuding groups, [creating] disinformation." Specific mention was made of "[creating] messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization [and to] submit fake documents and then call out the error…”

The file is very large, and will therefore take some time to fully examine. Nevertheless, we would like to state that this information was provided by an unknown party and may be an attempt to discredit Anonymous through a campaign of misinformation. More information will be coming soon.

So obviously, breaking out the champagne is premature, though perhaps chilling it might not be a bad idea.

You can go through the documents by downloading this torrent.

H/t Hedgehog at the Stellarparthenon BBS.

If You Want a Good Primer on the F-35's Electrical Power Systems…

And the problems therein, go read Bill Sweetman's latest on the latest problem with the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

Basically, it comes down to using bleeding edge technology, which, when juxtaposed with frantic weight reduction efforts, creates an absolute mess, just as it has with the failed bulkhead, the 360 degree vision system helmet and HUDless cockpit, etc.:

Another observation -- relevant to future programs -- is that the electrical problems (both this one and the AA-1 incident) have arisen from the use of a new system which, while it may have net advantages, is not core to the aircraft's capability -- you could in theory build a short-takeoff-and-landing stealth fighter without it.

The same goes for another headache area, the wide-field-of-view video helmet and HUD-less cockpit. The lesson may be that any innovations that fall into the nice-to-have rather than mission-essential capability should be low-risk when you incorporate them into the design.

In the larger picture, this is actually the alpha and omega of weapons development.

Too much whiz-bang for too much bucks.