Sunday, August 12, 2007

Republicans - tough, determined, relentless and incompetent

Steve Benen over at Talking Points Memo reports on a New York Times story that explains in detail what has gone wrong in Afghanistan after Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invaded that country.
...after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush seemed to appreciate the importance of his responsibilities and the task at hand. He was aware of the fact that Afghans had been abandoned by the West before, and the president, in April 2000, vowed to avoid the syndrome of "initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure."

"We're not going to repeat that mistake," he said. "We're tough, we're determined, we're relentless."
Apparently incurious and incompetent trumps tough, determined and relentless. Afghanistan is now (again) a disaster.

Rumsfeld made his classic mistake of thinking all it took was a fast invasion. He then not only did not failed to send in enough troops to occupy the country, he refused European offers of a multi-national force to do that job. Then he pulled out most of the effective forces in Afghanistan and sent them to the stupid distraction that we now call the War in Iraq. The result is that both of those nations require more American blood and treasure, and there is no certainty (and in Iraq not even a likelihood) of any degree of success.

The string of similar failures to government have followed. FEMA, an agency which under Clinton had performed brilliantly, was a total disaster in New Orleans. Bush's promises to rebuild New York and assist the first responders with health care remain unfulfilled, as do Bush's promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

The American housing and mortgage markets have been sacrificed to Bush's need to be reelected in 2004. Money to fund Medicare has been stripped from the budget to use to pay for his disaster in Iraq and the corruption of the contractors he has hired to do the work an Army needs to do. The Republicans in Congress who have supported all of this incompetence silently have been too busy selling their votes and ear-marks to bother to govern.

The Army and Marine Corps, both active and Reserve, are digging down to barely competent recruits and bribing them to become cannon fodder because Bush has destroyed both institutions.

Bush has been forced to try to censor public opinion against his incompetence it has gotten so bad.

And yet his incompetence seems to know no bounds. Bush has supervised the estblishment and use of the most detailed set of torture procedures seen since the Nazi period. His security seems to consist of a secret list of people who are not allowed to fly on American aircraft. What gets someone on that list is classified (but appears mostly to be people who have written and spoken out against the idiocies of the Bush administration or people, even children as young as age six, who have names that resemble such political naysayers) and it is well known that once you are on the list, there is no way to get off.

The use of the National Security Agency to evesdrop on phone calls and email by anyone has been expanded beyond all reason, but it is concealed behind a cloak of secrecy to keep its political misuse from being made obvious. This was an expansion of the earlier National Security Letters used by the FBI to search people's bank accounts, book purchases and library records without a warrant or probable cause. An audit showed that the FBI was using these letters for all kinds of investigations unrelated to National Security without any effective control. Since the letter made it against the law for someone addressed by such a letter to tell anyone, including their own lawyers, there is no effective control on the police state at all.

These are just some of the things we know about.

When more of them come out, the Republicans will have either of two responses. The first will be to run for election or reelection, and with their reputations they will lose it. The second is to take lessons from the Chinese.

China? Take a look at the report by the New York Times entitled China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People.
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency. [Snip]

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. [Snip]

While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.

Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.” [Snip]

Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.

When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth.
A system like this an more of the authoritarian measures like the "No-fly" list hidden behind a veil of total secrecy, the similarly secret FISA wiretaps and FBI National Security Letters, together with an expansion of the existing bush program to simply "disappear" people (see 39 individuals the Bush administration have "disappeared" in violation of the rule of law..)will be the only alternative to total defeat in fair elections.

If you don't think the Republican Party is carefully looking at when to adopt this procedures, you either aren't watching them or you are a Republican yourself.

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