Conspiracy is the best avenue for a conviction, in terms of legal principle, but it will be hard to prove.

Assange obviously can't be convicted of treason -- he's not an American. And it's hard to get him on disseminating classified information, as the MFM specializes in that sort of sedition, and such a prosecution probably isn't going to come from the Obama Administration. As a purely legal matter, the First Amendment doesn't give you license to break the law, but judges tend to take what they call "policy considerations" into account.

Conspiracy seems harder to prove but less likely to ruffle media feathers. Encouraging someone to commit a crime is a crime anywhere.*

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

If Manning's telling the truth, I imagine he'd have those records, somewhere, or they'd be discoverable. On the other hand, I don't know tech at all, and it's completely possible (all things are possible to the ignorant, as I am) that Assange pulled some hacker trick so that Manning would have no record of their correspondence.

I know people are going to say "prosecute him under the Espionage Act," and I agree, but it's never a bad thing to have a Plan B. Plus, I just don't think Obama or Holder, confirmed men of the left, are going for Plan A.

* Yes, I am aware that the media does this, too, the encouragement of/ facilitation of the crime of disseminating classified information. So I do get the objection that any media type who would object to a prosecution based on the Espionage Act has a very similar rationale to oppose a prosecution based on conspiracy.

I'm not sure why I think it's a little different -- I just do. I guess maybe because it's one step removed from the crime the media wants to engage in (dissemination of classified information).

One thing I don't know about is just assassinating him. I know that's a popular cry, but obviously it would be controversial, and obviously President Prissypants isn't going to do that. Beyond that, though, I have trouble conceiving of assassinating someone for doing what in their minds is the right thing to do, and, from a certain point of view (that is, a certain mode of thinking) is a plausibly right thing to do.

That seems to me to sort of being imposing the death penalty over a difference in philosophy. I don't like leftists, and I'm no fan of Assange's, but I don't know if I could (if I had the power) decide that I was so sure of my point of view that I could sentence a man to death for disagreeing with me.

A moot point, given that Obama definitely isn't going to kill a lefty hero. But I wonder where I'd be if the situation weren't hypothetical, if, say, the President were Dick "Warcock" Cheney and this was at least a live possibility. I think even a Cheney would refuse to order the hit, and I'm pretty sure I'd back him up.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (79)
Post contains 687 words, total size 4 kb.

We already knew Collins would vote for it, in whatever form,and then Olympia Snowe said "me too" for a stand-alone bill. Her previous objection was procedural: She didn't want the repeal made part of a defense funding bill.

And now Scott Brown, somewhat predictably, as he had the same objection.

Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown today voiced his support for a stand-alone repeal of the militaryÂ’s DonÂ’t Ask, DonÂ’t Tell policy, bringing the bill one vote over the 60-vote threshold that it will need to reach if and when the Senate votes on the measure in the coming weeks.

Joe Manchin voted no previously, but an aide said he would have voted yes if his vote had been needed. Another bit of Democratic kabuki, then, with a supposedly conservative Democrat only casting a conservative vote if it's superficial and meaningless. When Team Liberal calls, though, they're there with bells on.

Posted by: Ace at 07:13 AM | Comments (340)
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.

There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:58 AM | Comments (234)
Post contains 23 words, total size 1 kb.

This is going to be a rather ambitious project, but none of the 10 weekly posts will be too terribly wordy. There are very few art critics or historians out there hailing from the right side of the political spectrum these days. As my handle implies, I intend to be one of them, what with my fancy 3/4ths of a college degree and crappy art. The brief description of Ace's site is "a smart military blog." Well, you can't have smart without, you guessed it...sm. There will be lots of sm, condensed into a weekly post.

Moron Art will continue, and I have several submissions at the end for this weeks edition. If you would like to show off your mad sm skills, please submit a JPEG of your work HERE. Be sure to include your AoS handle along with the title, dimensions, year and medium of the work.

Tonight's thread will just be a flashy introduction to the Ten Works Any Moron Should Know. Every subsequent weekly post will focus on one of these works and, well, why you should know it. Art for much of its history was a direct reflection of the society as it was, for good or for bad. We can examine a hundred-year-old work with fresh eyes today and find truths still relevant to the basketcase of a world we live in- perhaps a sad reflection that the more our civilization changes, the more things stay the same.

You may be shocked that I opened a new perspective. You may be angry that I grossly overinterpreted a painting. Most of you will be asking “what is going on and where the hell is Ace and the rest of the co-bloggers?," to which I already have an easy answer for you: I have pictures of a certain ewok.

So here are the ten pieces you should know, and if you disagree then you are worse than Nancy Pelosi:
more...

Posted by: CAC at 07:54 PM | Comments (235)
Post contains 618 words, total size 7 kb.

While I have been aware for 40 years of the hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to the horrors inflicted by leftist/collectivist regimes -- I read "The God That Failed" all the way back in 1970 -- I remain to this day dumbfounded by the Left's willingness to see Hitler and Nazism as pure evil and yet excuse or overlook the vastly greater deaths and horrors that took place under Communism via Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. As the author of this article notes, the Left tries to excuse it as being "merely" due to mismanagement and weather.

That is a lie. It was the depths of hell, every bit as much as the extermination camps of the Nazis, and just as horrific:

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later. . . .

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Until the Left truly acknowledges these crimes and ranks them alongside Nazism, they are and will remain morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:33 PM | Comments (96)
Post contains 566 words, total size 3 kb.

Welcome to yet another semi-half-assed hump day ONT.

How The Iconic Sounds of Star Wars Were Made

One of the lesser appreciated aspects of the Star Wars series are the unique sounds that it has thanks to foley artist, Ben Burtt, who discovered and developed the sound effects for blasters, light sabers, Wookie groans, etc. that are now iconic. Here's video from a documentary showing how Ben created some of these sounds.

I remember as a kid discovering that banging on guy wires made a laser gun kind of sound - and now I find out that that's exactly where the blaster sound came from originally.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:47 PM | Comments (440)
Post contains 730 words, total size 7 kb.

Oh, that's precious.

Forty eight billion. Why, I remember the days we talked about 48 billion like it was real money and stuff.

“The Epicenter is a proposed estimated $48 billion (Phase One) mass scale urban reclamation project for combating, reducing, reversing and/or eliminating poverty within under served communities by utilizing mass scale economic redevelopment to bring about stability and self reliance.

I like that "(Phase One)" in parentheses. I'm searching to find out what the hell Phase Two could possibly be, but no one seems to know.

I'm thinking if 48 billion is the foot in the door, Phase Two has got to involve real money.

Thanks to Monty.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (544)
Post contains 164 words, total size 1 kb.

Experts guess the IDF did it, but in a second article I'll link in a second there's plenty of speculation it was the US, too.

The Stuxnet virus, which has attacked IranÂ’s nuclear facilities and which Israel is suspected of creating, has set back the Islamic RepublicÂ’s nuclear program by two years, a top German computer consultant who was one of the first experts to analyze the programÂ’s code told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

“It will take two years for Iran to get back on track,” Langer said in a telephone interview from his office in Hamburg, Germany. “This was nearly as effective as a military strike, but even better since there are no fatalities and no full-blown war. From a military perspective, this was a huge success.”

...

Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United NationÂ’s nuclear watchdog, said that Iran had suspended work at its nuclear-field production facilities, likely a result of the Stuxnet virus.

This long piece from Newsweek (which I'll digest if you're boycotting) gives me some hope that someone, somewhere in the intelligence committee knows what the fuck they're doing.

In case you didn't know how Stuxnet worked (I didn't), here's the brief: The high-speed centrifuges spin so quickly they need very careful monitoring by a computer program to slow them or speed them up or balance them. Obviously, this happens far too quickly for any human being to be able to handle it; it's automated. If they spin wrong, it causes mechanical damage and break-downs.

The Stuxnet was introduced physically to the computers monitoring the centrifuges physically by a USB drive or the like (and possibly unknowingly; a technician might have had his thumb-drive secretly infected). It then waited for a while, spreading itself around. At an appointed time it began to deliberately cause the centrifuges to spin wrong and thus the break-downs; many centrifuges are broken or out of service.

One thing about the worm that didn't quite work is that it was supposed to disappear, invisibly, probably so that the Iranian scientists would never discover what the problem was; or to possibly prevent replication by enemy hackers; or perhaps to not leave a trail (for legal reasons, Newsweek guesses, but what? What, is Iran going to sue?); or perhaps to make sure the Stuxnet never somehow got out and started screwing up non-targeted machines by accident.

But the worm was discovered, and is now being analyzed by hackers and cyber-security expert, who call it a work of art.

The real damage to the Iranian nuclear program, however, was done by Stuxnet—the most sophisticated computer worm ever detected and analyzed, one targeting hardware as well as software, and a paradigm of covert cyberweapons to come. “Stuxnet is the start of a new era,” says Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the U.S. National Security Agency. “It’s the first time we’ve actually seen a weapon created by a state to achieve a goal that you would otherwise have used multiple cruise missiles to achieve.”

According to figures compiled by David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank that follows the Iranian program closely, Tehran had major problems bringing new centrifuges online throughout 2009. The first 4,000 already installed at the Natanz facility continued to spin, but the next 5,000 were beset by delays. The worst problems came in an array of centrifuges known as A-26, which Iran began installing in late 2008—around the time Stuxnet was sent on its mission. In the late summer of 2009, half the functioning A-26 centrifuges had to be pulled out of service. At the turn of this year, Albright has learned, 1,000 more simply broke down. This may have been the “limited number” Ahmadinejad was talking about. [Reference is to a previous quote in which Ahmadinejad reversed the state's official line that the attack was ineffective and conceded that a "limited number" of centrifuges were temporarily taken off-line.]

This makes it seem dispositive that it was state action, and not, say, some White Hat hackers deciding to do some good on their own:

What’s clear, says Clarke, is that major resources went into Stuxnet’s development. Microsoft estimates that building the virus likely took 10,000 man-days of labor by top-rank software engineers. Unlike most of the worms and viruses that wreak havoc on computers, this one was not designed to spread far and wide, doing damage wherever it landed. It is structured to target a specific set of devices manufactured only in Finland and Iran that are used to determine the speed at which the centrifuges rotate. If that speed is not modulated perfectly, vibrations make the machines break down, as indeed they have. According to Eric Chien of the antivirus firm Symantec, who has pulled Stuxnet apart like a strand of DNA, all that incredibly complex information was built into it before it ever infected the Iranian system. Clarke suggests that whoever developed Stuxnet probably had the same types of software and centrifuges on which to run tests. “That’s expensive,” he says. “That’s millions of dollars.”

The article also discusses the assassinations of the Iranian scientists. Newsweek's guess is that Israel did the violent stuff, and America did the Stuxnet, but Israel also has a legendary cyber unit that could be responsible.

The last couple of paragraphs stress that the super-sophisticated, 10,000+ man-days worm, now having been discovered, can be modified and used as weapon by others.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (148)
Post contains 900 words, total size 6 kb.

This guy is just plain sweet.

Here's what you're going to see: Basically, this guy is a real-life Chris Farley Show guy, if you remember that old SNL sketch, where Farley could not get a coherent sentence out and his questions ranged from the obvious to the moronic.

Is it real or a goof? The guy has an advertisment on the video, so he could be doing this deliberately for hits. I'm going to guess say it's real (although, now that I think about it, I'm doubting it more and more -- why would the guy basically put his outakes in his finished video?).

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (36)
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.

On President Clinton outshining Obama at the podium. Next Media Animation does it again.

Special moment: The Clinton-Signal Obama aims at the sky to summon his heroic savior. And the depiction of Clinton generally. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (76)
Post contains 54 words, total size 1 kb.