Posts from — August 2008

The prosecution was looking for a sentence of 30 years to life, and the tribunal gave Hamdan 6 months plus time served.

From CNN: Bin Laden driver sentenced to 5 ½ years

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (CNN) — Osama bin Laden’s former driver was sentenced to 66 months in prison Thursday after his conviction on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda.

Salim Hamdan, who has been imprisoned at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, has been credited with five years served.

At this point his lawyers may not appeal, because he only has 6 months left and will probably finish the sentence before an appeal will be heard. The problem is what happens to him after the end of the sentence – will he be released, and if he is, where will he be released to?

When you have Raum Emanuel and Steny Hoyer in the House leadership, you get an increase in RePUPlicans, AKA “Blue Dog Democrats”. The effect of this is that you have the type of people running for office as Democrats who do not believe in the principles the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for, like respect and equal rights for all Americans.

John McKay reports on a Democratic candidate gay bashing in a Kansas race, while Mustang Bobby found anti-Semitism in a Tennessee campaign.

This is the Democratic Party of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. Do we really want to go back there?

First of all this case was always going to be made on “circumstantial evidence” because the perpetrator(s) was/were very knowledgeable about the evidence gathering techniques of law enforcement. The envelopes were standard Postal Service pre-stamped that can be bought anywhere, and everything else involved, except the spores, was readily available all over the country.

All of Dr. Ivins friends and colleagues are saying that he wasn’t the type of person to do something like this. The people who knew the guy in Canada arrested after decapitating a fellow passenger, are saying the same thing sorts of things. I had a fellow investigator tell me one day that he had concluded that if you a saw someone helping a little old lady across the street, you should kill them immediately, because only murderers seem to do that. It should be noted that he was finishing up a murder investigation with a cast iron case against a nun who was beloved by thousands of students and coworkers.

The BBC article, Scientist ‘lone anthrax attacker’, gives you an overview of the evidence, while the CNN article, FBI accused of hardball tactics in anthrax case, covers some of the naysayers.

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Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald has the story, Guantanamo jury gives mixed verdict on Bin Laden’s driver

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — A U.S. military jury on Wednesday convicted Osama bin Laden’s driver of providing material support for terror but found him not guilty of a more serious charge of conspiring with al Qaeda in a string of worldwide terror attacks.

Salim Hamdan, 37, stood and listened with head bowed to an Arabic translation as he became the first man convicted at trial in the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.

He said nothing but wiped his eyes with his head scarf.

Six senior military officers, led by a Navy captain, deliberated for a little more than eight hours across three days to announce the verdict at 10:16 a.m.
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• 1538 – Bogotá, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada.
• 1777 – Revolutionary War: Battle of Oriskany.
• 1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.
• 1909 – Alice Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip.
• 1923 – Henry Sullivan swims the English Channel.
• 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim across the English Channel.
• 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 90,000 people were killed instantly.
• 1960 – Cuban Revolution: In response to a United States embargo, Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation.
• 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into United States law.
• 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web.
• 2001 – White House briefing entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. delivered to George W. Bush. This document foreshadowed the September 11, 2001 attacks.

People Are Born:

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Believe it or not, Paris Hilton has responded to the John McCain ad.

How low can this campaign go?

While I was watching the Gulf, CBS reports the real violent weather was in the Midwest: Tornadoes Rip Through Chicago

(CBS/AP) Severe thunderstorms plowed across the Midwest during the night, ripping roofs from buildings, chasing people to shelter and blacking out thousands of homes and businesses. One death was blamed on the storms.

At least three tornadoes struck the Chicago area, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds. One of those hit Griffith, Ind. with a force that left homeowner Jeff Jelensick in disbelief.

“This was my son’s room, no roof there either,” Jelensick said. “It hit everywhere on this house. It’s amazing.”

Gusts over 90 miles an hour – stronger than winds generated by tropical storm Edouard – tore into a nearby shopping center, lifting off roofs and turning businesses inside out, Reynolds reports. One fatality was reported in northwest Indiana from a falling tree.

Let’s see – This is all normal; there aren’t any changes; you’re exaggerating. Oh, yes: it’s all right because Al Gore still needs to be on diet.

The BBC reports on arrests in a credit card theft ring

The US authorities have charged 11 people in connection with the theft of credit-card details in the country’s largest-ever identity theft case.

They are accused of stealing more than 40m credit and debit card numbers before selling the information.
…

Three of those charged are US citizens. The others come from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China.

The 11 suspects are alleged to have illegally obtained card numbers, account information and password details by driving around neighbourhoods and hacking into wireless equipment.
…

The accused targeted at least nine retail chains, prosecutors allege.

Those affected were TJX Corporation – which operates the TJ Maxx chain of shops – BJ’s Wholesale Club, Barnes and Noble, Sports Authority, Boston Market, Office Max, Dave and Busters, DSW shoe stores and Forever 21.

This is what happens when you tell communists about capitalism. My possible identity theft exposure was due to one of the many government employees who can’t seem to keep track of their laptops.

I don’t use IE for a number of reasons, beyond the simple fact that it is a piece of MS garbage, but other people do, so I started looking behind the curtain with the Sitemeter problem.

The thing is, I use Sitemeter, and my site was visible using IE7, so it wasn’t just a Sitemeter problem, it was a design problem. The reason my site was visible is because the Sitemeter code was stuck at the bottom of the page, after all of the formatting, and outside any subsections [div] on the page. That’s where they tell you to put it:

Position the cursor in your page where you’d like the counter to go. A good place is at the bottom of the page right before the </BODY>tag.

According to their explanation on their blog for the IE problem:

The error occured when the SiteMeter tag was not a direct child of the body tag (e.g. if the tag was within a table or div).

During my testing I noticed that IE screws up my page, ignoring my Cascading Style Sheet [CSS] on the sidebars, and generally makes a mess of things.  Guess what, I have two little JavaScript routines to count down the number of days until the Shrubbery leaves office, and the number of days Osama has been free.  When I removed those from the sidebar, IE started following the CSS directives.

My conclusion is that IE doesn’t handle JavaScript well when it is in a table or div.  I didn’t change anything, IE changed something.

As of 4PM CDT, Edouard has been downgraded to a tropical depression, with winds of 35 mph, located 35 miles North-Northeast of Houston, Texas.

Position: 30.0 N 94.8 W. [1 PM CDT]
Movement: West-Northwest [300°] near 10 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph.
Wind Gusts: 70 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 999 mb.

It is currently 35 miles East of Houston, Texas.

Edouard made landfall at 1200 UTC [8 AM CDT] in the McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge on the Upper Texas coast between High Island and Sabine Pass with maximum winds of about 55 kt [65 mph].

The folks over at Nukes & Spooks are reporting that another bad idea of the staff of Rumsfeld, the Chauncey Gardiner of the Pentagon, has been stamped out

Today comes the news, not unexpected, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has shuttered–the official euphemism is “disestablished”–the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA.

CIFA was widely criticized for gathering data on anti-war protesters, allegedly because they represented a threat to military bases and facilities, under a program known as Talon. The agency was the brainchild of Rumsfeld aides Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz. (Our colleague Walter Pincus of the Washington Post did a lot of the groundbreaking reporting on this issue).

The Talon database, itself shut down last year, had about 13,000 entries, including nearly 3,000 reports on U.S. citizens.

I’m not sure that you could call anything proposed by Cambone and Wolfowitz a “brainchild”, as that presupposes the presence of a brain. There is more evidence of brain activity in mildew than those two.

I’m sure there will be someone somewhere who is decrying our loss of the ability to track the nefarious activities that take place at Quaker potlucks and vegen picnics, but if they would switch from Cheetos to carrot sticks, they would feel better.

Michael at Musing’s musings wrote about this research at the end of last week, and Juan Cole of Informed Comment noticed today and linked to ‘Major discovery’ from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution.

The problem with solar power is what happens when the sun isn’t shining. The normal procedure is to use the solar cells to charge batteries, and then use power from the batteries. That isn’t very efficient.

With solar cells powering a device using the process from MIT feeding a hydrogen fuel cell you can design a nearly closed system that will generate power when necessary, not just when the sun shines, whose waste product is some heat, which can be used to for hot water in a bathroom.

The water put into the MIT device is split into hydrogen and oxygen, which is used to power the fuel cell and generate electricity and some heat.  The fuel cell combines the hydrogen and oxygen back into water which is returned to the MIT device.  The energy from the solar cells is stored as hydrogen and oxygen.

If the device will scale, i.e. if it still works when it is much larger than a model on a laboratory bench, this system has great potential.

Position: 29.0 N 92.8 W. [1 AM CDT] Updated
Movement: West-Northwest [290°] near 10 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 60 mph.
Wind Gusts: 75 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 997 mb.

Currently about 90 miles East-Southeast of Galveston, Texas.

A Tropical Storm Warning is now in effect from Grand Isle, Louisiana westward to Port O’Connor.

A Hurricane Watch remains in effect from west of Intracoastal City, Louisiana to Port O’Connor, Texas.

The BBC has reported that the writer has died.

He was a great writer, better in Russian than in translation, but he was not the man that most people in the West assumed. He said many times that democracy and liberal ideals were corrupting, and he didn’t approve of them.

The Wikipedia article on Александр Исаевич Солженицын [OK, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn] cover some of it but his neighbors in Vermont would be more enlightening as to what a kvetch and major PITA he was as a human being.  His neighbors in Russia agreed with those in Vermont within a short time of his return after listening to his harangues.

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