New York Times Magazine terrorist fearmongering

Here is the cover of the 1/31/2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine... I don't think any comment is required.

Military news correspondants far from impartial

The New York Times reports that many former military officers that appear as commentators on news networks are not held to the same impartiality standards as other pundits. These analysts regularly had conflicts of interest, including lucrative government contracts for businesses that they were involved in. Furthermore, not towing the Pentagon's line would result in that commentator getting cut off from insider information in the future. As a result, these analysts opinions were almost always in line with the Pentagon's story, misleading the American people about the true nature of the news.

NYC Subway Police with Machine Guns

My life keeps looking more and more like the society in Half-Life 2. Police in the New York City subway are apparently now carrying machine guns and wearing full body armor all over the place. Great, this CLEARLY protects us from those equally heavily-armed terrorists that are running around America's transit systems. I wonder how many innocent commuters are going to be riddled with M-4 bullets after the smoke clears.

Hey, terrorists, want bomb designs? Look no further than the Republican Leadership!

This happened a few months ago, but is so shocking that I can't help but post it... in a confused effort to promote how good they were on national security, the Republican Leadership ignored the advice of every competent security advisor (including America's "security czar") and put documents detailing nuclear bomb designs on the Internet. The documents were only taken down after the New York Times exposed the incompetence of the act. This led, of course, to politicians trying to cover their ass by blaming the NYT for pointing terrorists to the document. Here's a good interview with a non-proliferation expert talking about the subject on Kieth Olbermann.

The military is now your personal accountant

It seems that the New York Times has revealed that the Pentagon has been doing a little peeking into the financial records of Americans. What makes this so troubling is that the military usually keeps out of cracking down on domestic activities, and focuses on important things abroad like instigating civil wars in Iraq. As Ars Technica points out, the CIA and the Pentagon have been requesting financial records of Americans from financial institutions and then feeding them into TALON, the data-mining anti-terrorist program. This makes all of us red-blooded Americans feel a bit safer, knowing that a computer program, which has the vast potential to register false positives, is now charged with labeling you a terrorist threat. Awesome. Not only that, but we get the peace of mind that comes along with the military and the CIA investigating us. I feel safe, because they never screw up.

Saddam's botched trial

There's a great article in today's New York Times Magazine (distributed weekly with the Sunday edition of the newspaper) about how Saddam was convicted for the wrong things at a convenient time, and that the whole thing ultimately failed to introduce any kind of closure to the Iraq situation, something that the war's supporters hoped the trial would do. Human Rights Watch, Saddam's lawyer and the UN's condemnation of the trial show that the trial does not have any legitimacy in the international community's eyes.