Leader of the pack

In the American reportage of Afghanistan one byline stands out in the fog of war: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. In one scoop after another, the 64-year-old Hersh has thrashed his colleagues, including his old rival Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post and Watergate. Hersh led the pack on the intelligence failure on the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre; he had the best insider account of disarray at the CIA; he revealed US wiretaps on the ugly shenanigans within the Saudi royal family, he reported US contingency plans to disarm Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and, most controversially, he reported that a raid behind Taliban lines by US elite commandos was far from the “flawless” operation the Pentagon claimed. It was an “outrage” that left several US troops wounded, a military officer told Hersh. And all this from the freelance Hersh’s tiny, cramped Washington office. Guardian UK

Happy birthday to Ghost in the Machine, which celebrates its second birthday today too.

Happy birthday everyone — Follow Me Here, and following me here and there, are two years old today.

From The Daily Brew: “The really scary part isn’t the military courts, the wiretapping of lawyers, or the arrests without charges. We expected that. After all, the Republicans had sent a mob, hired and paid for with American taxpayer dollars, to seize power in the first place. If the GOP was willing to stage a riot in broad daylight to deny Americans their right to vote in Florida, it is hardly surprising they would use Executive Orders to deny Americans their right to a fair trial back in D.C.



No, the scary part is the almost complete silence that has greeted these actions! Americans, understandably shell shocked by one disaster after another, seem unable to as much as complain as one after another of their freedoms are stripped away.” [emphasis added]

Bin Laden’s nuclear secrets found: “Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network held detailed plans for nuclear devices and other terrorist bombs in one of its Kabul headquarters.

The Times discovered the partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned safe house in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city. Written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English, the notes give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons.” The Times of London

Seizing Dictatorial Power: ‘Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.’ NY Times William Safire, bless his heart, adds his conservative spleen to the rising hue and cry about what it has occurred to some for the past several weeks to call the Bush Dictatorship.

Brain scans can reveal liars — ‘Brain scans can reveal whether someone is lying or telling the truth, US researchers have discovered. When people lied, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans revealed significant increases in activity in several brain regions.

Daniel Langleben and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania hope fMRI could be used for more accurate forensic lie detection.’

“The fact that deception requires extra work in a number of brain regions may indicate that the deception involves inhibition of the ‘default’ response – truth,” adds Langleben. “Interestingly, this agrees with the traditional definition of deception dating back to Saint Augustine: ‘Deception is denial of truth’.”

New Scientist

A particularly bad time for the development of such an intrusive technology, with the massive abrogation of rights underway in the US. And a saintly notion that there is nothing between total candor and outright deception, demonizing the private spaces between, won’t help.

Nuclear warhead reduction could leave plutonium at risk: ‘The US and Russia may have promised to take 9000 nuclear warheads out of service but they have no idea of how to dispose of the plutonium they contain, experts say.

Programmes for locking the plutonium into radioactive waste or burning it in nuclear reactors are being abandoned by the Bush administration because of their high cost. The default option, storage, could leave the plutonium more vulnerable to being stolen and made into bombs by terrorists.’ New Scientist