Saturday, October 25, 2003

 

search log

www.cia.gov. Search for Allele Habibou (former Nigeran foreign minister retired 1989
who "signed" a "memorandum of understanding" in 2000). No hits. This should not surprise me.
The CIA does not have information as out of date as the fact that Allele Habibou was once the Nigeran
foreign minister on the web even in archives.



www.cia.gov search Chiefs of state for Niger. returns one hit updated Nigeran cabinet for 2001
Same result searching for the current (as listed by the CIA anyway) foreign minister Aichatou
Mindaoudou.

www.google.com search www.cia.gov for chief and/or Niger returns the above and a link to
Nigeran cabinet update 2001 in what's new 2001.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/chiefs/chiefs131.html


http://www.cia.gov/cia/2000wn_archive.html
April 6- Posted updated Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments with updated entries
for Botswana, Chad, Czech Republic, Guinea-Bissau, France, Moldova, Nepal, Niger,and Russia.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/2001wn_archive.html
September 25 - Posted updated Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments with
updated entries for Albania, Macedonia, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, St. Kitts, Turkey.
This update will reflect changes made in
foreign cabinets during the period 18 September 2001 - 24 September 2001.

Notice from "what's new at the cia" you can see that entries for the cabinet of Nigeria (shows up when one
searches for Niger) are quite common. I believe this means that the updates occur when a cabinet changes so
chiefs*.html is always current. It might mean that the CIA pays more attention to Nigeria than to Niger.

Only the most recent update to "Chiefs" is available on the web. However it is clear that over at the CIA
they should have some back issues no ?

I know this adds little to the last post. The point is that there is no conceivable possible way that the
forged documents could have tricked the CIA.

posted by Robert permalink and comments1:09 AM

 

Still seriously underworked (or more exactly underdisciplined) I am working 7 months late to question the accuracy of the documents purporting to show that Iraq bought Uranium from Niger in 2000. I've just logged on and post this as the start gun for my effort to find proof that the documents were forged.

posted by Robert permalink and comments12:36 AM

Friday, October 24, 2003

 

Talk about beating a deceased horse not to mention shooting fish in a barrel, but not having anything else useless to do, I decided to see how long it would take me to prove the notorious Iraq-Niger Uranium documents were forged using google and a modem.

I'm embarassed to say that I have been at it for almost two hours (while also cooking and eating dinner). My error was to download the CIA Fact Book for the year 2000 with a modem. Then I found out that it listed only the president and prime minister of Niger.

Oddly when looking for the documents themselves google sent me to Italian investigative journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo. I happen to be a fan of theirs. I think they are the best investigative journalism team in Italy (the competition isn't very fierce). In this page they mainly quote Seymour Hersh' article in the New Yorker (not available for free on the web).

Some of their stuff is available translated into English. I'm not sure how much, but their reports on the Berlusconi government would be amusing to people who don't find the Bush administration absurdly dishonest enough.

The main facts are
"As Seymour Hersh wrote in The
New Yorker on 31 March 2003, "One letter, dated
October 10, 2000 (the memorandum of understanding
between Niger and Iraq -- La Repubblica editor's note)
was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a [Niger]
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, who had
been out of office since 1989. Another letter (dated
27 July 2000 -- La Repubblica editor's note) [...] had
[...] a text with inaccuracies so egregious [...] that
'they could be spotted by someone using Google on the
Internet.'" It might also be added that 500 tonnes
of pure uranium is such an enormous quantity that it
should have aroused the suspicions of anyone familiar
in any way with the country and the commodity
concerned, and also that the letter dated 30 July 1999
refers to deals struck in Niamey on 29 June 2000, and
that the 27 July 2000 letter to the president of Niger
bears his own stamp and signature."

Yep sounds like a forgery which would fool intelligence analysts all right. I knew that the documents were obvious forgeries but I only really knew about the minister coming out of retirement to sign (with the title that was his no longer). While looking for facsimilies of the documents (haven't found them) I tried to check how hard it would be for the CIA to pick up that the so called foreign minister of Niger was not the current foreign minister in 2000. That's how I got tangled in back issues of the CIA world fact book (zip files with no index).

After an hour and a half of downloading files which turned out to be maps and flags I realized that the fact book would not contain the information I wanted. Fortunately I was searching as I downloaded and got to the highly relevant page which is unfortunately a bit too recent.

Finally finally I just went to http://www.cia.gov. Notice first page front and center what's new at the CIA contains a weekly entry "Posted updated Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments ... ". This is by far the most common item on the "What's new" section which is the most visible part of the CIA web page. I don't think the CIA is obsessed with cabinets, I just think that is the only thing they do which is so non secret that they share it with the public.

Now it seems that an organization which posts weekly updates on who is minister of what all over the world should be able to notice that something was signed by a "minister" who had been retired for over 10 yearsd doesn't it ?

posted by Robert permalink and comments12:16 AM

Thursday, October 23, 2003

 

I can't believe I am posting a link to Fox News but that's where Rumsfield's memo is posted.

I have read to paragraph 4 and find a remarkable statement showing, perhaps, less expertise about terrorists than I would imagine Rumsfeld has.

I quote "USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis. USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban - Omar, Hekmatyar, etc."

The odd thing is that Gulbudin Hekmatyar is not a Talib. He is the head of the Hezb i Islami a very different organization which has fought the Taliban.

Hekmatyar is a violent, anti-US fundamentalist moslem.
The Hezb i Islami are responsible for most (almost all)
of the devastation of Kabul done not by the Soviet Union, not by the Muhjedein (incl Hezb i Islami) fighting the
Soviet Union, done not by the Taliban or the
United Uniteds (US-UK) fighting the Taliban.
Kabul was largely destroyed by the Hezb i Islami (on Hekmatyar's orders) as it fought the other 6 Muhjedein groups for control of Afganistan.

One of the first effects of the rise of the Taliban was the destruction of the Hezb i Islami as an effective fighting forse.
This largely explains the significant support the Taliban originally had among non insane Afghans.

Hekmatyar is a particularly interesting case, since, unlike the Taliban he was assisted by US dollars. The division of US assistance to the resistance to the Soviet occupation was handled by Pakistan which gave the largest share to the Hezb i Islami.

I am an economist. Can it really be that I know more about Afghan politics than the secretary of defence ?

posted by Robert permalink and comments6:53 AM

 

hmm looks like Mark Kleiman's track back requires at least two references. OK fine here is a second reference.

posted by Robert permalink and comments1:31 AM

 

Mark Kleiman informs me about something alarming. Bad enough for me to tell the pregnant chads to come home all is forgiven. The new(er) electronic vote counting machines can be hacked. Actually it is trivial to do so (double click and edit the *.dbd file).

This is interesting partly because the manufacturer is trying to use its copywrite to block diffusion of internal e-mails describing the problem. It is mainly interesting because it is a threat to US democracy.

Now I don't really know much about computers, but it is obvious how this problem could be solved. As the e-mail (reproduced by Kleiman) notes the problem is that hard disks are read/write devices. Now the laptop on which I am typing also has a write only device -- a CD burner with a RW CD in it.

If our currently elected officials and/or the manufacturer of the vote counting system cared, they could add a CD burner to the vote counting machine and have the machine write votes to the CD. Now I don't mean an off the shelf CD but rather ones with signatures serial numbers you know like money (or paper ballots) placed in a sealed CD burner only to be opened in the presence of representatives of rival parties etc.

It seems to me that a fancy software based approach to guaranteing the authenticity of voting records is bound to be vulnerable to smart hackers, but that a simple hardware based approach to a paperless paper trail already exists. If fact, it has existed for a long time since sealed write once read many times (WORM) drives have been around much longer than CD burners (about 15 years old now).

I suppose there is an explanation other than bad faith for reliance on hard disks but I sure can't think of it.

posted by Robert permalink and comments1:13 AM

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

 

I am member of a minority which suffers in the job market -- Short people (cue Randy Newman) ! Yes yes yes finallyI'm not just a white American man with rich parents. My sister always asked me how I could stand it and noted that, at least she was female. Now I can stand tall.

posted by Robert permalink and comments11:35 PM