A systems scientist looks at virtualization, scalability, and Ruby on Rails.

A Conversation with Jason Hoffman

China's computermakers tap vast rural market with simple tools and local officials' support.

A PC for peasant farmers? China targets digital divide

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantanamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes -- and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Rigged Trials at Gitmo

On November 26, 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamel Al-Maliki signed a Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America. Pursuant to this Declaration, the parties pledged to “begin as soon as possible, with the aim to achieve, before July 31, 2008, agreements between the two governments with respect to the political, cultural, economic, and security spheres.” Among other things, the Declaration proclaims the parties’ intention to enter an agreement that would commit the United States to provide security assurances to Iraq, arm and train Iraqi security forces, and confront Al Qaeda and other terrorist entities within Iraqi territory. Officials in the Bush Administration have subsequently stated that the agreement will not commit the United States to militarily defend Iraq. The nature and form of such a U.S.-Iraq security agreement has been a source of congressional interest, in part because of statements by General Douglas Lute, Assistant to the President for Iraq and Afghanistan, who suggested that any such agreement was unlikely to take the form of a treaty, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, or otherwise require congressional approval.

It is not clear whether the security agreement(s) discussed in the Declaration will take the form of a treaty or some other type of international compact. Regardless of the form the agreement may take, Congress has several tools by which to exercise oversight regarding the negotiation, form, conclusion, and implementation of the arrangement by the United States. This report begins by providing a general background as to the types of international agreements that are binding upon the United States, as well as considerations affecting whether they take the form of a treaty or an executive agreement. Next, the report discusses historical precedents as to the role that security agreements have taken, with specific attention paid to past agreements entered with Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. The report then discusses the oversight role that Congress plays with respect to entering and implementing international agreements involving the United States. Finally, the report describes legislation proposed in the 110th Congress to ensure congressional participation in the conclusion of a security agreement between the United States and Iraq, including S. 2426, the Congressional Oversight of Iraq Agreements Act of 2007, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on behalf of Senator Hillary Clinton on December 6, 2007; H.R. 4959, Iraq Strategic Agreement Review Act of 2008, introduced by Representative Rosa DeLauro on January 15, 2008; and H.R. 5128, introduced by Representative Barbara Lee on January 23, 2007.

Congressional Oversight and Related Issues Concerning the Prospective Security Agreement Between the United States and Iraq

U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs, according to a new collection of declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive. The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.

The new documents, released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, are the most definitive declassified evidence to date linking the U.S. to a Colombian paramilitary group and are the subject of an investigation published today in Colombia’s Semana magazine.

Colombian Paramilitaries and the United States: “Unraveling the Pepes Tangled Web”

In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted today to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

Harvard To Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles For Faculty

A conversation with Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Conference

A conversation with Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Conference - Charlie Rose

As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the “American Public” sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaper full of Philippine atrocities:

It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the “water cure” to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until their bodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the “treatment” can begin all over again. The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

“But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news?” the World asked. “Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”

Responding to the verdict in the Glenn court-martial, Judge Advocate General Davis had suggested that the question it implicitly posed -- how much was global power worth in other people’s pain? -- was one no moral nation could legitimately ask. As the investigation of the water cure ended and the memory of faraway torture faded, Americans answered it with their silence.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

Annals of American History: The Water Cure

Anthony Cordesman:

No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. A combination of the surge, improved win and hold tactics, the tribal uprising in Anbar and other provinces, the Sadr ceasefire, and major advances in the use of IS&R have transformed the battle against Al Qaida in Iraq. If the US provides sustained support to the Iraqi government -- in security, governance, and development -- there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.

The attached briefing provides detailed graphs and maps taken from material provided to me during my visit to Iraq. The briefing is an update on the situation throughout Iraq, and shows the trends over the past year. These graphs and maps measure major acts of violence, ethno-sectarian violence, and trends in IED and other forms of attack. These same trends emerge from a detailed examination of what is happening in Baghdad, Anbar, and Central Iraq. They show the war is far from over, but the violence has been sharply reduced, and perhaps to the minimum levels possible until Iraq improves its governance and development and moves much further towards political accommodation.

It is clear that Iraq can only succeed with years of additional US support in security, governance, and development. The progress in 2008 and 2009 cannot be decisive or irreversible. It will take strong US involvement throughout the life of the next Administration to succeed, and it may well take US aid through 2016.

Presumably Samantha Power is making this clear to Obama.

The Situation in Iraq: A Briefing from the Battlefield

Democratic primary voters need to pay close attention to independents. The polls suggest hard-core Democrats would be happy either with Hillary Clinton or Mr Obama. But there is no doubt who does better with independents. Until this week, Mrs Clinton's strength has been her ability to turn out the vote in solid Democratic states such as California and solid Democratic constituencies such as blue-collar voters. But she repels many independents who associate her with Beltway business-as-usual.

In contrast, Mr Obama sounds the themes that most appeal to independents—frustration with America's broken politics; hope of finding pragmatic solutions by reaching across the partisan divide. And independents have not disappointed him. Mr Obama beat Mrs Clinton among such voters almost everywhere, even in her strongest states such as New York and California. A recent Pew poll suggests Mr Obama has a 62% approval rating among independents, the highest of any candidate.

This should weigh heavily on the minds of the Democratic “superdelegates” (office holders and party elders who have an ex officio vote in the convention) if they are called upon to break a tie in the delegate race. Mrs Clinton's biggest problem is not that she is being out-campaigned by the silver-tongued Mr Obama. It is that she seems to belong to the previous era of American politics—the one of battling political machines. Republicans have accidentally stumbled through to the next age of politics, although the message has not yet reached the backwoods wing of the party. The big question now for many Democrats is whether their party can do likewise.

A declaration on independents