Politics: March 2006 Archives

I'm a lot more concerned about U.S. Hiring Hong Kong Co. to Scan Nukes than I was about the Dubai Port deal. A company with connections to a rival power who wants to displace the US hired to undertake security scans.

The administration acknowledges the no-bid contract with Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. represents the first time a foreign company will be involved in running a sophisticated U.S. radiation detector at an overseas port without American customs agents present. (emphasis mine)

As opposed to DPW, which is a company owned by a country which has been a staunch US ally, and had no security responsibilities.

And a U.S. military intelligence report, once marked "secret," cited Hutchison in 1999 as a potential risk for smuggling arms and other prohibited materials into the United States from the Bahamas.

The CIA currently has no security concerns about Hutchison's port operations, and the administration believes the pending deal with the foreign company would be safe, officials said.

Did anyone else hear circus music running in their heads while they read that?



HOWEVER:

Wilkes, the NNSA spokesman, said the Bahamian government dictated that the U.S. give the contract to Hutchison.



"It's their country, their port. The driver of the mobile carrier is the contractor selected by their government. We had no say or no choice," he said. "We are fortunate to have allies who are signing these agreements with us."

Okay, here's the basic situation as I understand it.



We can have employees of these port operators running the equipment, or we can not have scans at that port. So the US government has no choice as to who does the scans. Furthermore, the equipment is automatic, and the driver does nothing except move it appropriately. So we might pick up a certain percentage of any nuclear surprises before they get here, assuming there's no official cooperation with the shippers of said surprise. This is therefore an improvement, but the fact that it's an improvement says nothing good about our Department of Homeland Security, with which I become more disgusted almost daily. We need to have said containers evaluated by persons selected for their loyalty to the United States. If it costs money, then those are legitimate costs that can be legitimately passed on to the companies looking to import stuff into the U.S. And if this drives prices up a wee bit, consider the damage that would be done by one nuclear or biological bomb on the waterfront of, say, the Port of New York, never mind a coordinated strike on several ports, which is a thought that I'm certain has occurred to our enemies.





Linked to Don Surber

Argghhh! has a wonderful article, including a link to a power point presentation, that indicates the military "gets it" as to what it will require to win the war on terror. Pay particular attention to slide 15. It indicates who the enemy is not.



As usual, it's our political class - mostly on the left side of the isle, as the President has demonstrated he does understand - where the difficulties in understanding lie.



Jawa Report notes that the report doesn't talk about winning the war of information, and suggests hacker privateers. Actually, the concept he espouses is more in line with the concept of bounty hunters, as privateers usually had their targets determined for them, at least as a class, by their Letters of Marque and Reprisal. My comment is that this is an excellent idea, but more in the line of a defensive tactic. Nobody ever won a war by sitting on the defensive.



The offensive tactics? Telling our side of the story. This is being done right now, for free, by literally millions of people (of which I hope to count for one). The difficulty is that they're not being heard at a level above background noise. Go to Mudville Gazette, or any number of milbloggers, to read first hand accounts and expert evaluations of what is going on. Go to Argghhh!, Blackfive, and many others.



Also important, perhaps more so, are people like Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject!. We live in a cynical age, and to show reverence for the achievements of the United States and the western world is to invite all of those who "are living in the real world and know better" (or think they do anyway) to come down and publically ridicule you as "naive", "brainwashed", or worse. We have heard all our lives, constantly, about the limitations and failures of western society. What they fail to understand is this is the equivalent of nitpicking the performance of the team that has won not just the gold medal, but every medal in the sport of improving the human condition in the last four hundred years. Those nations who have prospered in real economic terms have all done so to the extent that they have adopted an open, western model of society. If you look at when that success happened, and to what degree, it has nearly perfect correlation to the adaptation of the western model. Yeah, we in western society have our mandatory deductions, but focusing only upon the defects is like griping that we only shot 985 out of a possible 1000, when nobody else cracked 600. It's like complaining that your SAT was only 2350 (I understand it goes to 2400 now), when nobody else in the class beat 1800. Most precisely, it's like defaming a long distance runner who hasn't finished yet because he's "only" nine miles ahead of the second place runner. We are still improving, and the critics perform a vital function, but to fail to place the criticism in the context of how much we do right is to do everyone a disservice of the most grave sort. The news of what we've done wrong, and what has gone wrong, is only news because of how much we have done right.



We have replaced despotic, repressive governments with freely elected ones.



We have replaced political systems where the transfer of power was done at the point of a gun, with ones where the transfer of power happens because of ballots.



We have won two wars against incredible logistical barriers with microscopic casualties, and fought low level guerilla warfare against the loser's holdouts with incredible success by any historical comparison.



We have, if anything, more global goodwill and respect for having the fortitude to act, than at any time since the end of the Marshall Plan.



We have succeeded so well by every measure without those of our citizens not directly involved making any significant sacrifice. Compare and contrast this to World War II.



Our foreign success is so overwhelming that we have the luxury of debating whether tapping phone calls made by known enemy combatants that happen to call sympathizers here in the United States was illegal or even inappropriate. (Clue: it is neither)



Our foreign success is so overwhelming that it has permitted negligences and oversights of a most heinous nature domestically, because those lines of defense (and they are lines of defense) have simply not been tested since creation.



So, yeah, Homeland Security is a joke, but it's a joke because they think they're performing a sinecure (They're not, as we're going to find out some awful day that I hope isn't worse than 9/11). Our response to Katrina wasn't anything like what it could have been, but contrast that with the nations hit by the tsunami in 2004, and consider that what Katrina did was much worse in terms of destructive power. So keep it coming, critics, but put it in context - and you'll find yourself the most effective, most enthusiastic cheerleaders on the planet.