Ray McGovern

NSA Servers

According to a draft memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nominee to head up the new US Cyber Command will be current NSA Director Keith Alexander. Alexander is a three-star General and is expected to earn a fourth star after his appointment. The creation of the US Cyber Command comes amid rising concerns over computer attacks on our nations networks. [I Watch Obama]

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander may well be harboring the proverbial thought attributed to prevaricator Oliver North upon being spared punishment -- and instead getting rewarded handsomely -- for lying about the Iran-Contra Affair: “Is this a great country or what!”

Gen. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency since August 2005, is about to become what the Army describes as “dual hatted.” The Senate is about to confirm him to a new, highly sensitive leadership position requiring the utmost integrity and fidelity to the Constitution when he has shown neither.

Yet, after sizing up the enormous challenge of running the new U.S. cyber-warfare command, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, looked at Gen. Alexander and added, “And you’re the right person for it.”

Not for the first time, neither Inhofe nor his colleagues seem to have done their homework. Or maybe it is simply the case that Congress now accepts being lied to as part of the woodwork in the Capitol.

Alexander, you see, has a publicly established record of lying about NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. Call me naïve or obsolete, but when I was an Army officer it was understood that an officer did not lie — and especially not to Congress. Gen. Alexander seems to have missed that block of instruction.

And the same can be said for so many other very senior Army officers. It becomes easier to understand why Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba compared some of his colleagues during the Bush administration to the Mafia.

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Stephen Lendman

"Instead of recommending an equitable end to a 62 year conflict, Reut Institute (RI) advises sabotage and subterfuge against growing global forces it fears, ones effectively undermining Israel's legitimacy, so to prevail they must be subverted and stopped."

Working pro bono for Israeli government agencies, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute (RI) provides "real-time strategic decision-making" support in areas of national security and socioeconomic policy.

Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried.

In a January 28 brief, RI said Israel:

"face(s) a dramatic assault on the very legitimacy of its existence as a Jewish and democratic state. While the ideological framework for this delegitimacy was solidified after the first Durban" World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, "the trend (got) a boost by the perceived lack of (political) progress, coupled with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza," followed by the damning Goldstone Report.

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Charles E. Carlson

This writer left the Gaza Strip on March 10th. During the preceding week over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds were wounded and a number of Israelis died. I interviewed Muslims and Christians Arabs, including evangelicals; a co-ed college English class; a PLO officer and a United Nation aid worker--both off the record; the chairman of a mental health organization treating traumatized children; a businessman resident of a refugee camp; a young Muslim woman named Shireen who wanted to talk to America on the record; a number of workers and numerous youths in several Internet cafés and several Israeli travelers and businessmen. I also witnessed and photographed from my rooftop an Apache helicopter raid that killed four Palestinians and wounded 30 more. The edition(s) to come will lay the blame for the 52-year slaughter and suggest a low-cost, no-lives-lost solution to the problem and a humane course for Americans to follow.

Two friends accompanied me when I walked out of Gaza, the same way I had walked in --through a 600-meter barricaded gauntlet at Ares gate. As before, no one but me entered or left this crowded non-country of more than a million persons during the half hour that it took to process out. Consider this one incredible fact there is virtually no human traffic in or out of Palestine. At the only border crossing where people are allowed to pass through not one human soul went in or came out.

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Glen Whitman

"New paternalist policies, and indeed the intellectual framework of new paternalism itself, create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism."

For as far back as memory reaches, people have been telling other people what’s good for them — and manipulating or forcing them to do it. But in recent years, a novel form of paternalism has emerged on the policy stage. Unlike the “old paternalism,” which sought to make people conform to religious or moralistic notions of goodness, the “new paternalism” seeks to make people better off by their own standards.

New paternalism has gone by many names, including “soft paternalism,” “libertarian paternalism,” and “asymmetric paternalism.” Whatever the name, it arose from the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, which studies the myriad ways in which real humans — unlike the agents who populate most economic models — deviate from pure rationality. Real people suffer from a variety of cognitive biases and errors, including lack of self-control, excessive optimism, status quo bias, susceptibility to framing of decisions, and so forth. To the extent such imperfections cause people to make choices inconsistent with their own best interests, paternalistic interventions promise to help them do better.

What sort of interventions? To the casual reader, the new paternalism might seem to have little to do with government at all. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge[1] and Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational[2], for instance, often read more like advice manuals than policy manifestos. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find a wide-ranging policy agenda at work.

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