"Civilian Contractors" Cross a Fine Line

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The latest “it” within intelligence and military circles seems to be the use of civilian contractors for interrogating prisoners. I don’t like this at all and neither should you.

These men are usually trained by the CIA/military or former CIA/military agents. Despite what the term “contractor” might imply these are simply fulltime 1099 employees of the CIA/military. When’s the last time you hired a contractor to interrogate someone (the police surely don’t do this). This is an extremely gray area. I would assume, like any other contractor, the CIA has contracts with these individuals stating that the CIA is not culpable for what these contractors do while working for them. The light bulb goes off.

The same happens in real life. If I do a job for a company (say Ford) which directly results in you getting overcharged on your next Ford car statement I’m the one who pays, not Ford. The CIA and military are, in a word, “privatizing” the grayest part of what these government agencies do: extract information from uncooperative people.

This means, simply, that if a civilian contractor kills someone the civilian contractor is responsible and not the CIA or military. It’s genius! This means the CIA can simply say “I’ll pay you $X do get Y information” and leave the “details” up to the contractors. When things get out of hands the CIA denies any wrong doing.

You want to know what is so crazy about all of this? Civilian contractors where exempt from prosecution for crimes committed abroad until Congress passed a bill in 2000 that allows the MP’s to ship you back to face felony charges at home. That’s right! The CIA could hire a civilian contractor, who could intern do whatever they wanted to abroad without fear of prosecution back home. Luckily, things have changed. But, the problem still remains that the true culprits are getting away scott free: the CIA and military personnel who circumvent international treaties and US law by using scape goats they’ve personally trained and paid for thanks to a loop hole in the current law.

We should ban civilian contractors from working with and for the CIA and military. If our government can’t work within established laws and treaties we have bigger problems than terrorists.

And don’t give me that crap about “terrorists don’t work inside the laws or treaties so why should we?” You know why? Because we’re better than them and we hold ourselves to higher standards.

White House says

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Recent media reports have been saying that there is a lot of double speak coming out of the White House concerning the Iraq/al Qaeda link. These are the facts as we currently know them.

  1. Whitehouse says there is no direct link between Iraq and al Qaeda concerning 9/11 specifically – You’re right, if you’re talking specifically about the September 11th attacks, we never made that claim.
  2. 9/11 panel sees no link between Iraq, al-Qaida – the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday that Osama bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found “no credible evidence” of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida in attacks against the United States.
  3. Cheney blasts media on al Qaeda-Iraq link – Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were “irresponsible.”

As much as I hate to say this the reality is that the White House is right. They, as far as I can find, never said Saddam and al Qaeda worked together to pull off 9/11. What they are saying is that along the way Iraq and al Qaeda did have contacts with each other. The commission even says this.

… the commission also found that bin Laden did “explore possible cooperation with Iraq.”

But man, the White House really, really sucks at making their case. I’ve laid out an intelligent argument showing that the media (and bloggers) are basically jumping the gun to make fun of the White House on this one. Here is what Bush said (this is classic Bush here).

“The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” the president said.

Oh, OK that clears things up. Thanks for all of the interesting information supporting your claim. This is the kind of retarded logic the White House uses all the time. It’s the “just trust us” mentality. That’s not good enough for me. I’m happy to give you the benefit of the doubt, which is what I’m doing now, but you gotta give me something to work with! So, you’re wondering how everyone got confused? Before reading the following quote please re-read what the 9/11 commission said about the Iraq/al Qaeda link.

In his CNBC interview, Cheney went a bit further. Asked if Iraq was involved in 9/11, he said, “We don’t know.”

Oh, OK that clears things up. Sometimes I think this administration uses this sort of inter-contradiction with known facts, previous statements and other cabinet members just to confuse everyone and leave everyone scratching their heads.

UPDATE: It looks like Andrew Sullivan agrees with me [via Instapundit]. And you thought I only read leftist blogs!

UPDATE: Oh, so maybe they did vaguely say Iraq had a part in 9/11 [via Stephen VanDyke]. Bush wrote a letter to Congress in March of 2003 saying the following.

[A]cting pursuant to the Constitution and [the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002] is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Of course this can be taken either way. The White House could be saying that even communication with al Qaeda was aiding the terrorist attacks. It’s not the smoking gun that I’d like to see though.

Recent Side Projects

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Over the last month or so I’ve been working with Cameron Barrett of camworld.com fame to create a few interesting new blog related websites.

  1. Today’s Papers – Today’s Papers is a website devoted to aggregating news discussions. It works by pulling from over a hundred RSS news feeds, aggregating them by category and allowing users to both trackback and post comments to each news entry. It’s a great way for people to find out meta information and centralize discussions on the latest news.
  2. FH911.com – FH911.com is an online community for Michael Moore’s much anticipated and much debated new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. We don’t take sides, but merely allow for a forum to discuss Moore’s new movie, the controversy, his books, etc.

Feel free to check out the new sites and send me ideas, complaints, comments through the contact form on this site.

Checking Server Status – Easily

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I’m currently working on a simple backup script and I wanted to make sure my backup server was up before I sent stuff from my laptop over to the backup server (which is housed here locally on a nice software RAID setup). It’s nothing ground breaking, but I couldn’t find a simple utility to simply ping a server, timeout gracefully and return a valid exit code. So, being the geek I am I made one. 

<?php

  $timeout = 5;
  if (!isset($argv[1])) {
      die("Usage: php -q server_status ipaddress:port [timeout]n");
  } else {
      list($server,$port) = explode(':',$argv[1]);
      if (isset($argv[2]) && is_numeric($argv[2])) {
          $timeout = $argv[2];
      }
  }

  $fp = @fsockopen($server,$port,$errno,$errstr,$timeout);
  if (!$fp) {
      exit(1);
  } else {
      fclose($fp);
      exit(0);
  }

?>

Privatizing Social Security

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Ask any Republican if we should privatize Social Security and you’ll get a resounding “YES!”. Meanwhile, ask any Democrat and you’ll get a resounding “NO!”. As usual, the reality is somewhere in between. Many reports have indicated that the current Social Security system will no longer be solvent in about 40 years (solvent means “profitable” – in other words we would be paying out more in Social Security than we took in). You can blame this on all the horney WWII vets.

It was after viewing this AARP “tutorial” on Social Security that I had what some might call a stroke of genius. I simply call it a stroke of common sense. Here are the pro’s and con’s of Privatizing Social Security as I see them currently.

Pros

  1. Depending on how you invest your Social Security you could realize strong gains by investing in the stock market.
  2. This would be a major victory for the stock market, in general, as a substantial sum of money would be infused into the market in a relatively short period of time. This, however, is a short term victory.
 Cons

  1. Privatizing Social Security means you have absolutely NO guarantee that your money will be safe. Your money, once put into the stock market, will no longer be insured by the government.
  2. There is an enormous risk of corporate abuse. Companies could throw all the fees they wanted at transactions, etc. (ie. exactly what they do with your current IRA’s, etc.)

As you can see there are a couple of pro’s and con’s to each. I don’t think privatizing will fix the problem of us paying less in that we pay out. Here is how I think Social Security should be set up now.

  1. Make Social Security optional. If I want to be in total control of my retirement then let me be.
  2. Have two avenues for Social Security: a.) Government Bonds (pros: simple, insured; cons: very little/slow growth) b.) Privatized Account (pros: potential for high growth, flexibility in investment choices; cons: corporate fees, not insured, could lose your ass)
  3. Make sure all Social Security benefits paid for by employers cannot be invested in private accounts. This way if you do lose your ass in the stock market you still have something.

I think this structure could appeal to all sides (including Libertarians: see #1). The problem is that no one is willing to budge on this – each side wants all or nothing. Sad.

Bad Week For Bush

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And it’s only Monday! And I doubted those who said Bush and his cronies were over-achievers. At any rate here are some great stories coming out this week.

  1. The State Department to Correct Terror Report – The State Department said on Thursday its report that the number of international “terrorist” attacks fell last year was wrong and in fact had risen sharply.
  2. Cheney helped Haliburton land no-bid contract – Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and other Bush administration political appointees were involved in a controversial decision to pay Halliburton Inc. to plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq’s oil sector … The decision, overruling the recommendations of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the award of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton …
  3. Bush Rejects calls from Ronald Reagan’s family to relax stem-cell research restrictions – The White House rejected calls Monday from Ronald Reagan’s family and others to relax President Bush’s restrictions on stem-cell research in pursuit of potential cures for illnesses.
  4. Bush pays tribute to Clinton – In a rare election-year political truce, US President George W. Bush warmly paid tribute to Bill Clinton and even plugged his forthcoming memoirs at his formal White House portrait unveiling.

So, as expected, it appears that Cheney DID use his influence as VP to get Haliburton the fishy no-bid contract. Some will say that Haliburton had received no-bid contracts under the Clinton administration, to which I say this: Clinton nor Gore were never closely connected at any time with Haliburton. I’m not mad that a company out there got a no-bid contract from the government, which happens often, what I’m mad about is that it appears the VP of the United States used his office and influence to secure a no-bid contract for a company in which he was formerly CEO.

My favorite is that on top of all the bad press this administration has been getting lately Bush had to pay tribute to Clinton (the GOP’s version of the anti-christ) during the unveiling of the former President’s White House portraits. Ouch.

A Quick Bitmask HOWTO for Programmers

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Warning: Highly Geeky material follows.

I’m currently working on a large database for a customer. I’m actually redoing a crappy version of the database into a normalized screaming machine. I ran into a problem recently in that some of the values are stored as bitmasks. I knew what a bitmask was, but generally regarded them as voodoo magic left to crazy C hackers. Until now. I contacted my voodoo crazy C hacker mentor, Jeremy Brand, and asked him how they worked.

Here’s a quick tutorial:

instead of counting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… you could with powers of 2
instead 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, 2^4, 2^5… (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32…).

When you lable something with one of these powers of two you can
add them to other powers of 2 and then later on divide out what
you started with again.

For example:

apple = 4
orange = 2
banana = 1
———–
sum = 7

The sum of your identifiers is 7 (lets call this $sum).

So, later on you can check 7 to see what is in your basket:

does $sum mod 4 equal 0? (then there is no apple in the cart)
does $sum mod 2 equal 0? (then there is no orange in the cart)
does $sum mod 1 email 0? (then there is no banana in the cart)

Using bitmasks isn’t neccesarily easier to use, but it is fast.
It’s fast because computers already thing in bits. This example
is using 3 bit memory. Typically you’ll have 16 options (like I
have 3 here) because of the size of an integer. If you’re lucky
you’ll be using C or even mysql that can access all 32 bits of an
integer then you’ll have 32 options.

The reason why computers use base-2 to to begin with are because
with storage hardware there is really only two states: on and off.
The more single units that you can store ons and offs the more
storage the device can have.

FYI, you can use google for your calculator:
eg. http://www.google.com/search?q=7+mod+4.

Finally, that makes sense. I’m still completely lost on the actual math that goes into making this work (which irks me), but I did manage to get a proof-of-concept program working, which may help other bitmask deficient programmers out there: 

<?php

  // Copyright 2004 Joe Stump <joe@joestump.net>
  // Public Domain
  // Usage: php -q bitmask.php 1 4 32
  //        (any numeric argument will be evaluated - change to whatever)
  echo "Valid bitmask values (up to 16): n";
  for ($i = 1 ; $i < 16 ; ++$i) {
      echo "2 ^ $i = ".pow(2,$i)."n";
  }
  echo "nn";

  $bitmask = 0;
  $values = array();
  for ($i = 1 ; $i < count($argv) ; ++$i) {
      if (is_numeric($argv[$i])) {
          $bitmask += $argv[$i];
          $values[] = $argv[$i];
      }
  }

  echo "Bitmask Contains: ".implode(', ',$values)."n";
  echo "Bitmask Total: ".$bitmask."n";

  echo "nResults:n";
  $arr = array(1,2,4,8,16,32);
  for ($i = 0 ; $i < count($arr) ; ++$i) {
      echo $arr[$i].': '.((($bitmask & $arr[$i]) == 0) ? 'FALSE' : 'TRUE')."n";
  }

?>

The trick is the &. If the result is 0 (zero) then the single bitmask value is not present in the sum of the bitmask. I’m sure this has something with the fact that you cannot add any separate list of single bitmask values and get the same sum twice (ie. 1 + 2 + 4 = 7, 2 + 4 + 8 = 14). Again, I just know “it works[tm]”. I hope this helps someone else out there.

I’m mainly caching this here so the next time my retarded mind can’t wrap itself around bitmasks I can check back to my own site. If you have questions concerning this don’t email me because I still think little green men make this mathematic “trick” work. Damn, I wish I had gotten a Computer Science degree instead of a Computer Info. Sys. degree.

New York City: Part 2

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Things I would do if I ever went to New York City:

  1. Ride the subway
  2. Visit Central Park
  3. Go to a Yankees game and root for the opposite team
  4. Visit Wall St. during trading hours
  5. Check out Times Square, possibly say “hi” to Al Roker
  6. Go shopping in shops I can’t afford to shop in on 5th Avenue
  7. Stop by the location of the WTC
  8. Go to one of the many museums and art galleries
  9. Go bar hopping in a trendy “village” in Manhattan
  10. Eat somewhere with small portions and large bills
  11. Visit the Empire State Building
  12. Visit the Statue of Liberty
  13. Buy fake designer goods from a street vendor
  14. Throw risk to the wind and eat a hot dog from a street vendor

Things I didn’t do in New York City and neither should you:

  1. Take pictures of the poor bums on the street, while attempting to appear concerned
  2. Pose for pictures in front of Ground Zero with smiles on your face

Things I did in New York City that I would not recommend doing:

  1. Walking 2.9 miles in downtown Manhattan when the 2 train would drop you off a block from where you need to be
  2. Visit Queens, even if it saves you $30 on a cab ride to the airport
  3. Staying on Wall St. on a weekend, it’s lifeless and boring
  4. Go to Central Park with a.) no plan of attack and b.) no blanket

Things that surprised me about New York City:

  1. It wasn’t nearly as dirty as I thought it would be
  2. The people were, for the most part, nice and helpful
  3. The NYPD does an amazing job of keeping bums and rif raft out of Manhattan. I counted about 5 bumbs total, which is about 300 less than I counted the last time I visited Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco.
  4. Wall St. is a complete ghost town on the weekends
  5. The subway system, despite its legendary status, is largely a pile of crap

Overall, I had a good time in New York City. I can honestly say, though, that I don’t understand what draws people to the city. It smells, and wasn’t extremely exciting. Though it doesn’t smell as bad as New Orleans and is infinitely more exciting than Ypsilanti.

New York City: Part 1

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Lauren’s mother bought Lauren a trip to NYC for her graduation present. Because Lauren’s mom is cool like that she also paid for me to go as well. I have been so busy at work lately that I haven’t really had a chance to think about the trip. Friday we left for NYC at around 9:00pm on the wonderful Spirit Airlines from the equally sparkling airport DTW.

We didn’t end up getting to the hotel until about midnight and decided to get some sleep in preparation for the long day ahead of us. I had a meeting with some friends who I have been working on a project with at 11:00am at The Tomato, which was about 2.9 miles away. We decided to hoof it, which was a big mistake. 2.9 miles in the country is nothing, but 2.9 miles in lower Downtown Manhattan is a WHOLE different story. On the way we walked through the few blocks in the world that literally makes and breaks entire countries, otherwise known as Wall Street. We also walked past the location of the former World Trade Center, which is currently being, at least partially, rebuilt. We walked through SOHO and, I think, a portion of the East Villiage. Luckily, when we arrived there was a street fair to keep Lauren occupied while I went to my meeting.


After the meeting we decided to go back to the hotel and then ride the subway up to Times Square and Fifth Avenue for some shopping and general site seeing. Times Square was what I envisioned it to be; a mecca for tourists in NYC. Fifth Avenue was, in my opinion, somewhat of a let down. I was expecting to be blown away by outrageous prices on clothes I was both too poor and not cool enough to wear. In reality, I found that Kenneth Cole was having it’s “SUMMER BLOWOUT SALE!”, which has a certain irony to it, and more than a few stores resembled Old Navy.

After we had finished shopping we went back to the hotel to regroup and find a bar to hit up later that night. We decided to go to the Central Bar in the East Villiage. City Search says it’s “A cavernous Irish bar, more popular than authentic.”, which I would agree with. In fact it felt like a glorified college bar complete with retired fraternity boys and sorority girls, which normally puts me right into my element, but this was NYC and I wasn’t about to spend the night hanging out in this place. On the bright side it did make for some amusing people watching, especially the guy who would walk up to girls and do the robot and then brush his shoulder off. Yup, time to change venues. We ended up at some martini bar in the East Villiage sucking down Vodka and Espresso Martinis. As you can imagine we ended the night eating some crappy Mexican food.

The next morning we woke up early, and slightly hungover, to go on a ferry ride around NYC. It was a great way to get some steller pictures of the skyline and views of Lady Liberty herself. Once we were done with the ferry we headed out to the River Cafe, which was an upscale join Cameron recommended to us. To put it lightly, the food and service was amazing, as it should be at $35/plate. The resturant is actually a boat that sits across the bridge in Brooklyn with spectacular views of Manhattan. If you happen to be in NYC I highly recommend it, though dinner reservations have a month-long waiting list (which explains why we had brunch).

After lunch we took the subway back up past Times Square to Central Park, which was described by one of our cab drivers as “the best thing that ever happened to NYC” and I would have to agree with him. The place was, not surprisingly, packed with people. The park is HUGE and made for a great mid-afternoon walk in the sun. After leaving the park we went back down to 5th Avenue and Times Square, which was crawling with people. We picked up a few more tourist gifts and then headed back home on the 3 train.

Being Piston fans, we ended up at the hotel watching game five in our hotel room. The reality is that our feet hurt so bad we couldn’t have found and walked to a decent sports bar even if we tried.

American Idol Finale

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Not that the horrific voting even warrants a response, but I thought I’d tell my loyal fans what I thought about the finale. First of all, on a personal level, I hated both of the final contestants. While I think they both are fine singers, I think that Fantasia is a ghetto queen who probably says “my baby’s daddy” way too much and I think that Diana is a complete cutesy fake (Simon said this very thing when she first auditioned).

That being said, you can expect that I hated the finale. Well, I thought both did fine in the finale. I voted for Diana, because my hatred of Fantasia’s ghettoness won me over. In fact, I’ll go on the record saying I power voted for Diana. There, I said it. I fucking power voted on the worst reality TV culprit in the world.

So what’s the future hold for these lame ass wannabes? Well, it’s pretty obvious to me. First, Fantasia will come out with some lame CD that features the song she sang Tuesday night as well as her craptastic rendition of Summer Time (maybe they’ll even include her sobbing at the end of the track on the CD like she did everytime she sang it on the show – lame). Second, Diana’s fat ass will continue to sprial out of control and she’ll end up broadcasting her gastro bypass surgery like Carni Wilson did to a live Internet audience. Finally, the true American Idol, LaToya London, will release an amazing CD which will be met with rave reviews.

I can only hope that John Stevens attempts to remake some big band CD and is quickly booted back into obscurity.