Pundita

I know he isn't funny but Ahmadinejad is such a fiend that he reminds me of Rickman's wonderfully over-the-top depiction of evil in Prince of Thieves:

Frustrated with the inability of his economic advisers and experts to come up with any solution, Ahmadinejad told them that the only way out of the current stock exchange and financial market problems was to “frighten” speculators by hanging two or three of them.

For the rest of the story -- and more adventures of Sheriff Ahmadinejad -- stop by Regime Change Iran to browse the headlines and thank your lucky stars you don't live in Iran.

The language of the UN resolution on Syria was watered down this weekend to accommodate China, Russia and Algeria; specific mention of an economic embargo if Syria failed to comply with the resolution and a demand that Damascus renounce terrorism were dropped from the text.

However, the resolution, which was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council, delivers a clear ultimatium and threat of action under the UN's Chapter 7, which allows for the use of force. According to the Bangkok Post the resolution ordered that:

> Governments impose travel bans and freeze assets of any Lebanese and Syrian officials or other people to be declared suspects in the assassination of Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

> Syria "must detain" its officials or individuals that the Mehlis commission will charge with planning, organizing or perpetrating the murder of Hariri.

> Syria cannot interfere with Lebanese domestic affairs "either directly or indirectly ... and refrain from any attempt at destabilizing Lebanon, and respect scrupulously the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity and political independence of this country."

The resolution says "further action" will be adopted if U.N. demands are not met by Syria.

Syria huffed that they're being kangaroo-courted. Britain, France and the US huffed back that Damascus better take the resolution seriously.

Well, at least something's down on paper now. Up next: a lot of huffing and puffing over the next two months. Assad will try running to the Arab League for help. As to how much that will accomplish, here's a tip for despots: heads of state don't like it much when a former head of state they really liked is murdered in cold blood.

I received the following note in response to the October 25 Pundita post, George Galloway found lying under oath to US Senate subcommittee:

"Pundita:
Galloway and who else? He was a teeny little cog in the UN Oil for Food gravy train."

And here I thought of George Galloway as a cog in al Qaeda's war against America. Silly Pundita! But let's indulge my silliness a bit -- after all, it is Halloween -- and struggle to comprehend how Pundita got such a silly idea lodged in her head.

We'll have to track back almost a decade, to June 25, 1996, when 19 US soldiers were killed and 386 wounded by a truck bomb at the US military base of Khobar near the town of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Although al Qaeda did not overtly claim credit for the attack, it was demonstrably their work.

Just in case anybody missed the message, the day after the attack an old chum of Osama bin Laden's, Saudi Mohammed al-Massari, made statements on the BBC in London that practically shouted the Khobar attack was the work of al Qaeda, and which gave an explicit warning to the United States to clear out of Saudi Arabia if they didn't want to see more attacks. (1)

Al-Massari was the head of the London-based Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights. Just a few months before the Khobar attack he had been granted asylum in England because he'd had to flee Saudi Arabia. He fled because he'd repeatedly called for the overthrow of the Saudi government and demanded the government be replaced with a Muslim fundamentalist regime.

George Galloway never denied his involvement with the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights or al-Massari. And al-Massari denied that he was involved with al Qaeda. And Mr Galloway has always denied involvement with al Qaeda and terrorism, although the last is a bit tricky because many acts that the United States and Israel and now much of the world deem terrorism, Mr Galloway wouldn't. (2)

However, George Galloway was unable to deny his involvement with an al Qaeda operative named Saad al-Fagih. That's because in 1996 Galloway held a "secret" meeting with Morocco's Crown Prince Mohammed (now king) and a senior Moroccan intelligence official. (Clearly, the meeting didn't remain secret for long.) Galloway was in attendance to represent the interests of various Saudi 'dissidents,' including Saad al-Fagih, who was involved with al Qaeda. (3)

Al-Fagih purchased and gave a satellite phone to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The phone was used by Osama bin Laden and his associates to plan the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which left close to 250 Africans dead and injured nearly 5,000 while taking 12 American lives.

Al-Fagih was not a nobody in the al Qaeda network. He purchased the phone at the behest of bin Laden's representative in London, Khalid al-Fawaaz. The phone was shipped to bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mr Galloway refused to discuss the nature of his relationship with al-Fagih when questioned about the Morocco meeting.

Correct me if my reasoning is screwy, but if George Galloway was involved with a man who was known to be an al Qaeda operative, and involved enough to "secretly" negotiate for his interests with a foreign dignitary -- wouldn't that mean George Galloway was involved with al Qaeda or at least supporting their interests, at least during 1996?

1) "[The US military presence in Saudi Arabia] is obviously not welcomed by a substantial fraction of the population there. And they are ready to go to the execution stand for it ... There are so many underground parties -- so many splinter groups, many of them made up of people who fought in Afghanistan ... I expect more of the same..."

2) In 1997, while he was a Labor Member of Parliament, George Galloway blocked proposed legislation (the "Conspiracy and Incitement Bill") to ban foreign terrorists residing in Britain from "plotting and conducting terrorist operations overseas."

The bill was introduced in the wake of concern in Britain that Mohammed al-Massari was involved with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. This would be the same al-Massari who headed the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights.

Galloway's somewhat tortured argument against the bill amounted to saying that it's not terrorism if you're trying to overthrow a regime you consider repressive, and that foreigners shouldn't be penalized for plotting on British soil to overthrow wicked governments.

By blocking the bill, Galloway in effect made the British government a co-conspirator in all subsequent attacks launched by al Qaeda and other terror organizations with a base in Britain. That would include the attack against the British people in July 2005.

3) April 2003 Guardian The Observer: Fresh doubts surface over embattled MP

John Loftus reported on John Batchelor's show last night that several al Qaeda members, including some of Osama bin Laden's sons, have been spotted in Iran. According to Reuters in Berlin:

Iran is permitting around 25 high-ranking al Qaeda members to roam free in the country's capital, including three sons of Osama bin Laden, a German monthly magazine reported on Wednesday.

Citing information from unnamed Western intelligence sources, the magazine Cicero said in a preview of an article appearing in its November edition that the individuals in question are from Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Europe. They are living in houses belonging to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the report said.

"This is not incarceration or house arrest," a Western intelligence agent was quoted as saying. "They can move around as they please."

The three sons of Osama bin Laden in Iran are Saeed, Mohammad and Othman, Cicero reported. Another person enjoying the support of the Revolutionary Guards is al Qaeda spokesman Abu Ghaib, the report said.

Iran first said late last year that it had arrested and would try a number of foreigners suspected of having links to al Qaeda, a loose network of military groups that Washington blames for the attacks of September 11, 2001 and bomb attacks in Spain, Indonesia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The report in Cicero also accused the Revolutionary Guards' secret service of offering logistical support and military training to senior al Qaeda leaders.

Iran has repeatedly denied any link to or support of al Qaeda. [...]

That Iran is letting al Qaeda members hang out is not news, although the openness of the al Qaeda presence -- not even bothering to keep a low profile -- might be newsworthy. The eyebrow-raiser is that a German magazine broke the news on the latest intelligence findings about al Qaeda in Iran.

Technically, Angela Merkel at the helm in Germany should not mean a big shift in Germany's foreign policy; however, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, has already made himself unpopular in Europe. These things happen when an assassin with a rap sheet a mile long becomes a national leader.

Not content with embarrassing the EU Three (Britain, Germany and France), which worked so hard to negotiate with Iran about nukes, Amadi-Nejad is now trying to boss around Arab leaders. Yesterday he announced that Israel "must be wiped off the map" and warned Arab countries against developing economic ties with Israel in response to its withdrawal from Gaza.

Just to make sure nobody missed his drift Amadi-Nejad added, "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury."

The EU3 are trying to ignore the tacky remarks so they can restart talks with Iran about halting work at the Isfahan uranium conversion facility. This, according to unnamed diplomats quoted in today's Financial Times. One diplomat explained that the EU3 had made a point of keeping the nuclear issue separate from Iranian support for militant Palestinian groups during two years of talks.

Okay; but how are the EU3 going to keep the issue of al Qaeda bopping around Iran separate from the nuke talks?

"Dear Pundita:
Do you dress up and go to Georgetown for Halloween? If so, can you tell me what costume you'll be wearing? Maybe we can meet. I'll be dressed as Lucrezia Borgia.
Jenny in Washington, DC"

Dear Jenny:
Pundita has always preferred to scare herself silly on Halloween rather than scaring others. I've done this by calling at random Fortune 500 companies and asking, "Can you give me your thoughts on US foreign policy?" However, I'm bored with screaming and peeing my pants in terror. This year I plan to frighten the drunks in Georgetown by dressing up as Robert B. Zoellick.

If you need to understand why any American who cannot afford a security detail and easy access to a helipad should be scared of Zoellick, read about his career or glance through his latest speech on China. Keep in mind that the man Condoleezza Rice nominated to be Deputy Secretary of State will run the State Department in the event she is incapacitated.

If you really want to scare yourself, consider that if a Republican wins the presidency in the next election, it's a good bet Zoellick will be the next Secretary of State. Come to think of it, even if a Democrat wins Zoellick's probably a shoo-in for the post.

Those who look for Signs from on high should have figured out by now that when your nation's premier symbol of international trade collapses into dust, this is a sign that a country's foreign policy should be not controlled by big business concerns.

George W. Bush got the message on 9/11, then found himself in the same position as Vladimir Putin. Putin got it into his head that a determined band of ex-KGB officers would be enough to take down what he thought of as "gangsters" -- the group of businessmen, politicians and organized crime figures who were bleeding Russia dry.

Not long after a fire broke at his country home. The house and everything in it were reduced to ashes except for a Christian cross. Nothing else survived the flames.

Putin got the message: That's not gangsters you fool; that's the Seventh Ring of Hell you're trying to put in the slammer.

After that Putin, being a sensible sort, figured out that he was not saint material and so he needed to make compromises. That was if he wanted to live long enough to take a few whacks at Mordor's shins.

George W. Bush arrived at pretty much the same conclusion after his own father and other power brokers in the Republican Party stabbed him in the back over his decision to invade Iraq.

Actually, Pundita does not celebrate Halloween. Why bother, when it's Halloween 365 days of the year in Washington, DC? It could have been worse; there were rumors that Condoleezza Rice was angling to be Secretary of Defense.

In any case, nothing has fundamentally changed in Washington since the Clinton era; things can't change because in the mid-1990s it became official policy that trade issues would dominate US foreign policy. If that were all it would be scary enough, but that's not all.

If Eliot Spitzer or another American with experience at prosecuting gangsters becomes president, we might have a chance to learn what happened to the billions of dollars stolen from US taxpayers during the course of the US giving financial aid to Russia.

Starting in the early 90s State got deeply involved with Russian and other FSU oligarchs, who have close connections with big transnational Russian mobs and other mobs connected with FSU regions.

And by the mid-90s State had set up an American business 'desk' that put the affairs of state directly under the influence of transnational companies -- several of which doing business in FSU countries via contacts with the oligarchs.

I interject that State did not set up the desk in underhanded fashion; it's just that to this day, the American public is unaware of what State did and the implications, unless maybe they happen to have read Pundita's essays on the America Desk, better known as the Office for Commercial and Business Affairs.*

However, it's more likely it will be a freezing day in hell before there is an independent investigation of the US Department of State -- and USAID, I might add. And The World Bank.

Yet until independent forensic accountants start poring over records across all three organizations and cross-matching them, there is no way to start to investigate whether crooks are still dug in at those institutions.

Pundita wishes Paul Wolfowitz luck in his anti-corruption drive at the World Bank, but I think he will soon arrive at the same conclusion that caused Presidents Bush and Putin to back away from being martyrs and for nothing more than trying to empty the ocean with a sieve.

These musings recall me to Zbignew Brzezinski's words in 2000 about US aid to Russia during the 1990s. He said that "much of the money we have given to Russia has been misappropriated -- and we don't like to talk about this. The U.S. officials who worked closely on this are embarrassed about it."

Try to conceive of the kind of minds that would term that magnitude of theft an "embarrassment." The kind that would have been perfectly at home in Lucrezia Borgia's world.

* More on the America Desk and waiting for the cows to come home.

Pundita starts this post with advice for readers who didn't pay attention to the many months of tedious palaver running up to March 2003 then asked, "How the hell did that happen?" when they watched the bombing that signaled the US invasion of Iraq. Attend now to official yappity-yap and red tape winding around Syria so you're not bewildered later by fast-moving events.

This evening Britain, France and the United States distributed a draft United Nations Security Council resolution (No. 1559) under the enforcement provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The resolution demands that "Syria must detain those Syrian officials or individuals" implicated in the plot to assassinate Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

China is expected to attempt water down the resolution and try to pressure Russia to do the same. But the next step against Syria is underway. According to tomorrow's edition of the UK Times Online

The draft threatened "further measures" -- a reference to economic sanctions -- if Syria failed to co-operate with the UN inquiry led by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor. It also called for the assets to be frozen and a travel ban imposed on all individuals designated as suspects by Herr Mehlis’s investigation. [...] The resolution is likely to come to a vote at a special Foreign Ministers’ meeting of the 15-nation Security Council on Monday.

As to whether there's a military option tagged to the threat -- here we arrive at the complex part. The short answer is "no," however, Bashar al-Assad's government is not in hot water only because of their part in Rafik Hariri's assassination and refusal to cooperate with the investigation into his death.

This evening President Bush alluded to other sticky wickets by ticking off demands from the 'international community.' Syria must expel Palestinian militant groups, prevent insurgents from crossing its borders into Iraq and end Syrian interference in Lebanon.

Tomorrow, the UN will receive a second report on Syria's misbehavior. According to the (UK) Times, "UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen is expected to accuse Damascus of continued meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs."

So are we going to see military action at the end of the bureaucratic tunnel? Bush told al-Arabiya television that he hopes Syria will cooperate with demands to clean up its act, and that military action is the "the very last option."

Translation: Bush has refused to rule out the military option.

Something else may or may not happen tomorrow at the United Nations: Detlev Mehlis is expected to brief the 15 members of the UN Security Council on the findings of his commission. However, there is speculation(*) that the UN will give Mehlis another two months to finish up the investigation -- particularly under present conditions, which include a slew of credible death threats against the investigators. (It's always slow going when you have to move around investigators just to keep them alive.)

Alert readers will note that if Mehlis is given another two months, his investigation will wind up at just around the time Iraq's permanent government is installed. (The election will take place in December.)

At this point I envision several readers muttering, "What is this; the murder of Archduke Ferdinand? How come World War Three could be fought over some Lebanese guy I never heard of until his death?"

There will be no war touched off by Hariri's death. Syria's military has about two months to figure out what to do with Bashar al-Assad. They'll throw something together. This doesn't mean they'll head off war with Iraq; either they stand up to Tehran and refuse to keep sending fighters into Iraq, or there will be a military confrontation at some point down the line. The Iraqis will have no choice, if they want to draw down the terrorist attacks.

However, a quarter century from today, the 9/11 attack on America might have only a page in the history books, whereas Hariri's death could net an entire chapter. Why? Because his death was the "9/11" for Jacques Chirac and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah. What this means for the Middle East and in turn the rest of the world is only starting to unfold.

The only thing that's guaranteed in war is that both sides will make mistakes. Excluding the folly of the 9/11 attack and information still locked in classified reports, the biggest mistake the other side has made so far was ordering the death of Rafik Hariri. So keep your eye on reports about Syria.

* 10:50 PM UPDATE : John Loftus has just reported on John Batchelor's show that Mehlis has been given the extension and that the final report is due December 15.

Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- "Iraqis approved a new constitution that will establish a federal government, the next step in the country's transition to democracy ... Almost 79 percent of Iraqi voters approved the charter ... Voters in provinces within the so-called Sunni Triangle, a center of attacks on the U.S.-led coalition, overwhelming rejected the proposal, while Kurds and Shiites supported it, raising concern that the constitutional process won't succeed in healing divisions among the country's three main communities."

The sour grapes reaction from the United Nations: "Results of the referendum have indicated the degree of political polarization in Iraq," the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq said in an e-mailed statement in which it also praised Iraqis for turning out to vote. "This poses an ongoing challenge for all Iraqis and underscores the importance of an inclusive national dialogue."

The UN spin ignores that Sunnis who voted to adopt the Constitution did so because their clerics advised them to vote, and to vote "yes." Several Sunni clerics figured out that the Constitution gives Iraq's Sunnis a better chance of getting more representation than the practice of lobbing bombs at their countrymen. Pity they didn't come earlier to this realization; if they'd done so the number of Sunnis voting to adopt the Constitution would have been much higher.

"Galloway needed money to pay for his actions. We gave him oil to sell to make the money."
-- former Iraqi vice-president Taha Yasin Ramadan

The US Senate subcommittee investigating the UN Oil for Food program has found that George Galloway lied under oath about his involvement with the program. According to the UK Guardian the latest report from the committee finds that:

· "Galloway personally solicited and was granted oil allocations from the government of Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein. The Hussein regime granted Galloway and the Mariam Appeal (an organisation he set up to help Iraqis suffering from sanctions) eight allocations totalling 23m barrels from 1999 through to 2003."

· "Galloway's wife, Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received approximately $150,000 in connection with one of those oil allocations."

· "Galloway's political campaign, the Mariam Appeal, received at least $446,000 in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal under the oil-for-food programme."

· "The Hussein regime received improper 'surcharge' payments amounting to $1,642,000 in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal."

· "Galloway knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath before the sub-committee."

Statements from former members of Iraq's qoverment support the paper trail leading to Galloway:

Tariq Aziz, the former [Iraq] deputy prime minister who has been in jail since the US invasion of Iraq, allegedly told the investigation the oil had been allocated in the name of two of Mr Galloway's agents, one of whom was Fawaz Zureikat.

However, he added: "These oil allocations were for the benefit of George Galloway and for Mariam's Appeal. The proceeds from the sale benefited the cause and Mr Galloway."

Mr Aziz is one of the primary witnesses mentioned in the new Senate investigation. It quotes him as authenticating a letter supposedly sent by the head of Iraqi intelligence detailing a meeting between Mr Galloway, Mr Zureikat and an unnamed intelligence officer during which [Galloway] is said to have asked for an increased oil allocation. The letter was published in the Daily Telegraph in 2003. Mr Galloway successfully sued the newspaper, which is currently appealing against the ruling.

According to the new report, Mr Aziz "stated that he recognised the ... letter and recalled seeing it in the past".

Mr Aziz also allegedly told investigators that Mr Galloway had expressed concern to him about "the appearance of taking money directly from the Iraqi government", and asked for his and his wife's name to be omitted from official documents.

However, the report found that several documents, authenticated by former regime officials, did mention Mr Galloway by name. The report quoted the former Iraqi vice-president Taha Yasin Ramadan saying Mr Galloway, who is now an MP for the Respect party, was a "friend of Iraq" who "needed to be compensated for his support".

"Galloway needed money to pay for his actions," Mr Ramadan allegedly told investigators, adding "we gave him oil to sell to make the money".

According to the report, the claim was confirmed by the former minister of oil, Amer Rashid."

Of course Galloway is denying everything and his wife is quoted in the subcommittee's report as denying having received any money.

Senators Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Carl Levin (D-MI), Chairman and Ranking Member respectively of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) have led the investigation.

Thinking back to the May 17 testimony before the subcommittee, I well remember how those two very experienced attorneys carefully and politely questioned Galloway, and how they patiently and carefully listened to his insults, accusations and mockery.

At one point Coleman and Levin exchanged a glance but kept a deadpan expression. Roses for Norm Coleman and Carl Levin for their patience, persistence and careful detective work! Suddenly I feel an old song coming on. From May 16 Pundita post:

Vladimir "Lips" Zhirinovsky, "Gorgeous" George Galloway, David B. "Bunny" Chalmers, and Charles "Poofdaddy" Pasqua practicing for their American Idol audition:

"We're NOT crooks doo-wop doo-wop! We're not CROOKS yabba dabba! We got you goin in circles doo-wop!"

Simon to Paula: Who told them there was a Four Tops-barber shop quartet-Frank Sinatra soundalike category?

Paula to Simon: Probably the ABC Primetime crew.

Randy: (Wrapping his head in a towel) Okay dogs, you got 15 seconds.

"Doo-wop Doo-wop doop doop diddy
Talk about the boys from Ripoff City!
Talk to our bankers we ain't signed nothin
Talk to our lawyers we ain't seen nothin
O we're the same old song
Just a diff'rent meaning with the billions gone!
So here is our love song, not fancy or fine
We got you goin in circles
And we did it ouuuuur waaaaaaaaaaay
Doop!"

May 12 Coleman-Levin report: SUBCOMMITTEE INVESTIGATION INDICATES SENIOR FRENCH AND BRITISH OFFICIALS WERE AWARDED MILLIONS OF BARRELS OF OIL FROM SADDAM HUSSEIN

"The sense of disillusionment in the years between the [world] wars was heightened by political and economic disasters for which people were wholly unprepared: there was the folly of Prohibition and its attendant gangsterism, as well as growing evidence of illicit connections between crime, business and politics in American cities.
-- From Hard Boiled Crime's analysis of Film Noir

"The streets were dark with something more than night."
-- Raymond Chandler

"Dear Pundita:
Re your Chinese Puzzle post. I wonder if anyone else caught the allusion (assuming it was deliberate) to "Broadway's my beat." Now I'm hoping for a Damon Runyonesque posting.
Dr. Ernie in California"

Dear Dr. Ernie:
Yes, I wanted to convey a touch of the Runyonesque gangster genre but mostly Film Noir. Damon Runyon's stories represent a clearly delineated underclass in America's largest cities during the 1930s. The gangster films based on his stories draw a line between good and bad guys. In films based on stories by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which exemplify Film Noir ("black film"), the line is barely visible.

There are 'good guys' -- detectives such as Sam Spade. They move in the shadows of the underworld but also in another kind of darkness -- a confluence of organized crime, corrupt government, and illegal business practices. Heroism under such conditions equates to hanging onto a moral compass for another day.

That's also a fair assessment of the lot for heroes in Mainland China's society, which is why I gave a nod to the Film Noir genre to introduce the posts on China's mystery illness. Whatever the true nature of the illness, the tactics the government used to deal with it are a window on the society's pervasive moral decay.

Another window on today's China is found in the movie "Chinatown," which is a fictionalized account of the California Water Wars. Chinatown is also a tribute to Film Noir, so it came to mind while I surveyed earlier posts about mystery illness and also Taishi Village.

If you study the Taishi Village situation against the illegal maneuvers in the water wars, a hazy 'foreign' situation comes into clear focus and is perfectly understandable; there's nothing uniquely Chinese about it.

What happened in Taishi, which is repeated across the Mainland and the Third World, is an illegal government-arranged land grab using the most brutal means. The Taishi villagers were simply in the way of development in the Pearl River Delta, in the way residents of Owen Valley were in the way of plans to divert water to Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

Apologists for China argue that the country is going through an era of bare-knuckle capitalism as America did in earlier days. That's a crock because it implies the rule of capitalism. Capitalism doesn't rule anywhere in China, any more than it ruled in 1930s Chicago -- or 1890s Los Angeles; corruption ruled in those cities.

What rules in China doesn't have a neat label. It's imprecise to call it gangsterism or totalitarianism, nor can it be labeled mercantilism or communism. It's the worst of everything about every bad system of government, glopped together.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, re-read Dr. Wang's description of the makeup of China's mystery illness. He's not so much describing an illness as a cesspool of worst-nightmare diseases: bubonic plague, Ebola, and something so strange and awful he didn't know what it was. When I read his description I exclaimed, "If he's making it up, it's a Freudian slip. It's how Chinese bureaucrats think of their government: the glop horror!"

According to Wang the glop horror illness is also highly contagious -- perhaps another Freudian slip. The wealthiest Western democracies have pandered to China's glop horror government. That has encouraged China to promote their form of government to nondemocratic countries in the developing world.

So imagine if you saw a man shooting bullets into his feet while saying, "I'm having a hard time walking." That is the United States of America trying to promote democracy in the world. You have to leave Film Noir and turn to Theater of the Absurd to appreciate the situation:

On Monday a US official shows up in X country to make an impassioned speech about why they should adopt democracy.

On Tuesday the same official shows up in China to fawn over their newest economic miracle.

On Wednesday a Chinese official shows up in X country and tells that government: "Look how well we've done by keeping to a military dictatorship and introducing some free market principles. In fact, we just got a visit from an American official praising our success."

China has been carried on the backs of advanced democracies. Of course the dictators wooed by China know this but the vast majority of people they rule don't. So it's now easy for China to promote glop horror as a more reachable form of government than democracy for the world's poorest.

The good news is that during the last few years many of China's brutalized farmers are showing the same pluck as the Owens Valley farmers and ranchers. They were not called water "wars" for nothing. Ranchers dynamited the aqueduct at Jawbone Canyon in 1924 to open the Alabama gates and divert the flow of water for four days, which raised the price of water. That forced the City of Los Angeles to negotiate.

The megacity that is today's Los Angeles would not have been possible without the diversion of water from other regions, including Owens Valley, so those with short sight are philosophical about the triumph of the bad guys. However, there were a few drawbacks to the triumph, such as galloping desertification today and an arid flat that blows alkali dust storms across California's southern valley.

Water will have to be returned to Owens Valley else Nature will win the final round of the water wars. The law is making the point that Nature has not yet impressed on the shortsighted. (See the article on Owens Valley at the above link.) Starting in the 1970s, litigation has dragged on about re-watering Owens Valley, and Los Angeles has dragged their feet about compliance -- a tragic reminder that the law can be tediously slow. Yet when the will of the people supports the rule of law it is a force more powerful, sure and lasting than the edicts of despots.

"Pundita! Sam wants to know if you can rip yourself away from China pig disease long enough to comment about Syria. Are we going to war with them or what?
Not Born Yesterday in New York"

Dear NBY:
Iraq first has to ratify their Constitution (waiting on vote count) then elect a permanent government. Then they can declare defensive war on Syria and use US troops to help invade.

Iraq has tons of evidence that Iran and Syria have been making war on their country. Reality TV is huge hit in Irag -- foreign fighters caught then confessing in detail on TV about who put them up to the operation. Allawi's idea, I think it was. Survivor producers, eat your heart out.

So the plot to split Iraq by provoking civil war is so well known to Iraqis that it failed. Now Tehran is in a pickle because they know the timetable with regard to Syria and know their water boy Assad is on the way out.

Sticking point for the US: who do you put in Assad's place? Choices are between venomous snake and venomous snake. One of the candidates, Rifaat al-Assad, (same family), is a mass murderer.

If a suitable candidate can be found; i.e., one who goes after al Qaeda and remnants of Saddam's Baathists holed up in Syria, and calls off Syrian incursions into Iraq, then no major US troop action with regard to Syria.

Another sticking point is the Saudis, who want Assad gone (Hariri was close personal friend of King Abdullah) but are under obligation to defend Sunni interests in Iraq. Keeping Iraq off balance via incursions across the Syrian border is one bargaining chip.

Also there is Tehran, not happy with the thought of losing Syria puppet. And there is China's military, which wants to be best friends with Tehran. And there are the China flunkies on both sides of US Senate aisle.

To boil it down, China is exerting pressure through UN 'Third World' flunkies, Euro flunkies and flunkies in US to get Bush to draw down troops in Iraq.

Where does Russia stand? Not wanting to offend Tehran and China's military but not wanting to be left holding the bag. They know Assad -- the one who ordered Hariri's assassination -- is on his way out.

What a cast of characters. A shame Charles Dickens isn't around to chronicle them.

Also, and while this is not a scientific survey, Pundita has noticed something over the years since Bush and Putin became friendly. Every time Russia drags their feet about being cooperative with China, by coincidence Chechen rebels launch a spectacular attack inside Russia. Then by another coincidence the attacks stop when Russia agrees to attend China's picnics and backyard barbecues.

Putin would probably tell me I'm imagining things.

Anyhow, the way things stand now, State is trying to help the Syrians find a suitable replacement for Assad and taking pot shots at Rumsfeld and Bush every time there is fresh news of a border skirmish up Syria way.

As to whether Assad can stave off regime change, right now it looks no. However, Pundita is not in favor of the US meddling in Syrian politics. State should not be in such a rush to see Assad replaced because at this time, any replacement is going from the frying pan to the fire, if you think in terms of the Syrians embracing real democracy.

The longer Assad and his crew stay in office, the more obvious it is to the Syrians that the Baathist party and their politics are completely wrong for the country. What they need now is time to muster genuine opposition to the Baathists. They can't do that with Washington and Brussels breathing down their neck to replace Assad yesterday.

A cynic might say that Brussels is so all-fired anxious to get rid of Assad before he starts singing like a bird.

"Pundita, That China's leaders are even making a show of considering democratic reforms is to me another sign that Bush's democracy doctrine is gaining ground. What do you think?
Tom in Sioux City"

Dear Tom:
Sure the doctrine is making headway; there was never any question it would. Once I was summoned by the chief in a remote village in Asia. He asked me to stop smoking cigarettes while I was walking around the village. I had already made a lot of adjustments in my behavior so as not to offend the locals. That was the final straw; I made an uncooperative retort.

He replied that he wouldn't be asking if I came from any other foreign country but everything I did was imitated by the women and children because I was American and everybody knew America was king of countries.

Now just see how clever those old chiefs can be; he knew he'd gotten me in a hammerlock. But his logic was unassailable; everyone wants to imitate success. So if we had wanted the world's poorest countries to embrace genuine democracy, much depended on America's postwar leaders to lead -- to clearly articulate the principles on which this country is founded and make a sincere, consistent effort to stand by the principles they mouthed.

Instead, the leaders stood by the principles of NATO, which devolved to going along with Western Europe's idea of geopolitics, which is founded on expediency. The upshot was a betrayal of democracy so vast it is beyond reckoning.

The kindest thing you can say is that we lost our compass. George W. Bush found it. That plus 50 cents won't get us far without a lot of sustained effort. The biggest problem for America is not China's leaders; the problem is American academics, policy experts, government officials and businesspeople who find genuine democracy too messy and uncertain a process on which to base foreign relations.

Nowhere is this observation more applicable than with regard to China. Few Americans know the extent of the West's collaboration with Red China's regime because the history has been pretty well cemented over but some cracks have appeared and they are widening.

Yesterday Simon World published a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Simon observes about the wonderfully named reviewer:

Keith Windschuttle starts and ends his piece highlighting the responsibility of western intellectuals and journalists for praising the barbarism of Mao era and for lying against every evidence [...]

Lie they did, and on a scale that's almost beyond comprehension for Americans raised in the era of satellite communications and the Internet.

T. E. Lawrence had Lowell Thomas; Mao Zedong had Edgar Snow. Windschuttle writes:

In the summer of 1936, the American journalist Edgar Snow left Peking for China’s northwest to visit the new territory taken over by the Chinese Communist Party. There he conducted a number of lengthy interviews with the party leader Mao Tse-tung. He wrote them up and published them as The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, the first and only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow interviewed other Communist leaders and then converted all his material into his own book, Red Star over China, published in English in 1937–1938. [...]

He portrayed Mao and his supporters as heroic figures, dedicated to liberating their country from both the foreign invaders and the hopelessly corrupt Nationalists. Snow depicted them less as socialist revolutionaries and more as agrarian reformers, determined to break the shackles of feudal agriculture and liberate the peasants from their rapacious landlords. [...]

Snow’s book played a major role in converting public opinion in both America and Europe towards a more favorable view of Mao. Its biggest impact, however, was within China itself, where it had a profound influence on radical youth. Red Star over China and the Mao autobiography were quickly translated into Chinese and widely distributed.

Many young, urban, middle-class Chinese men and women who read Snow’s books were converted. They cut their long hair short -- still a daring and eyebrow-raising gesture in the 1930s -- and joined the Communist Party. By 1941, thanks to the reputation Mao had earned from the Long March, party membership had grown to some 700,000. [...]

The story that drew them there, however, was a fiction. The new biography Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday shows that every major claim made by Snow was false.

Read the rest of the review for a small idea of the consequences, then read The Unknown Story.

As to what today's Edgar Snows are up to with regard to China -- same thing they've been up to since they sold a cross between neomercantilism and slave plantation economy as "Chinese capitalism." You can bet they're gearing up to sell whatever swill China's leaders put out about democracy reforms.

However, I think your observation is on the mark. Without Bush breathing down their neck about democracy, China's leaders wouldn't have even bothered to put on a show. So that's how we measure progress. And it helps Chinese inside the military and the civilian government who've concluded that democracy is vital to China getting through this phase of their nation's development.

What does not help is the Kissingeresque approach of allowing lies and evasions to go unchallenged; this, on the excuse that China's leaders pick up their marbles and go home when they hear unequivocal language. Stop and think: how insulting is that? "Greetings. I see you are Chinese. That means you are incapable of reading anything but insult into straight talk."

What they're really concerned about is meddling, and they have good reason to be concerned after the circuses in Georgia and Ukraine. Yet we don't have to meddle; indeed, meddling is counterproductive. No orange, purple, pink or polka-dot revolution. All we need do, if we want to give really effective help, is stand by our principles and remind China's leaders at every turn what those principles are.

We also need to stop acting as enablers -- allowing China's leaders to save Face every time they evade reality and expect us to agree that the moon is made of blue cheese.

Why is that all we need do? Because we're not Pongo-Pongo. Hello, we are the most successful nation the race of humans has ever raised up. And people, being people, listen to success, provided it doesn't switch its story every 15 minutes and betray every principle it stands for in the name of triangulation.

If sticking to a story sounds hard, not as hard as living with the consequences of betraying democracy. To pound home the point I'll give the last word to Roy Hattersley, of The Observer

"Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have not, in the whole of their narrative, a good word to say about Mao. In a normal biography, such an unequivocal denunciation would be both suspect and tedious. But the clear scholarship, and careful notes, of The Unknown Story provoke another reaction. Mao Tse-Tung's evil, undoubted and well-documented, is unequalled throughout modern history."

". . .the China Mystery Illness investigation is more proof that when information exchange is democratized, when knowledge and talent are pooled and freely exchanged, the fog gets lighter. If China's government doesn't like that -- in a pig's eye will they hold up human progress."
-- from Chinese Puzzle post

August 3
China Alert: mystery disease reportedly Ebola; disease spreading fast

Ebola Outbreak in China: CCP Cover-up

August 4
About Boxun

When pigs fly

A cautionary note

August 5
Correction and more cautions

August 6
HN51, Virus X and a frightening flash from the past: Spanish Flu

August 8
Pundita plays Devil's Advocate about latest viral outbreak in China

August 9
On the difference between intelligence gathering and scientific method: lesson for serious news consumers

August 10
More on pandemic: Liz does math, Pundita does cryptic, and is there a Chinese biomedical expert in the house?

August 15
A new translation of the Boxun interview about the Sichuan disease outbreak

August 16
About Boxun

Once upon a midnight dreary quoth the Raven "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

August 17
The Pig from Outer Space

Dr. Wong's fan club, rejoice!

August 18
China: Tale of Blind Men and Dragon

August 19
The power of suggestion and bao jia

August 20
China: Arsenic and Old Race

August 21
Ignorance, Knowledge and the Three Strikes Rule

August 22
Places in the Heart

August 25
The Third Man

August 28
Sleight of hand

September 30
China Ebola virus reports: finally, a break in the case

October 1
Mystery disease outbreak in Shenzhen: Casablanca Factor and bolts of lightning out of the blue

October 17
Chinese Puzzle

Related
The Epoch Times vs Xinhua News Agency

China Puzzle Cheat sheet...

What would happen, I wonder, if Americans started asking managers at Target, Sears and Wal-Mart, "Why does this stuff have a Made in China label on it? If I have to buy imports, can't you sell more things made in India and other democracies?"

Do you think if enough Americans did that, it would send a message to China and encourage US transnationals to set up more branches in democratic countries?

Those ideas came to me last night while visiting Simon World. Simon has a treasure trove of reports on Taishi Village and issues related to China's forward retreat from an experiment in democracy.

Actually I didn't get very far into Simon's Taishi file because I was so excited to learn that Chinese have created a new system of government. Arthur Anderson of Enron fame is still working out the philosophical underpinnings, so we'll skip the abstract stuff and go right to how Accountocracy works.

First what you do is take away the right to vote -- voting being a socially regressive impolite process. Then, whatever it is that's bothering people enough to make them want to vote, you send in financial specialists to modernize accounting procedures in the trouble spot so the problems go away.

No system of government is perfect so Accountocracy has a few bugs; mainly, you have to be a very advanced human being to practice it. For those Chinese just descending from the trees the Communist Party has worked out an alternate form of government called Socialist Democracy, which is Accountocracy without the accounting part.

Point #3 in the Socialist Democracy credo is sure to appeal to people who still demand bananas for breakfast, lunch and dinner: "China's democracy is a democracy guaranteed by the people's democratic dictatorship."

To strip it down, Socialist Democracy is the system of government already in place in China but with the word "democracy" prominently featured in the pamphlets and with thugs who say, "This is your democratic right" before they beat you to a pulp when you ask for the right to vote.

Now we move to the problem of ensuring Chinese are happy with their new forms of government. Here, technology has the answer because if you can easily check up on how everyone is thinking you can learn whether they're happy.

This is also a good way to ensure foreign journalists aren't responsible for deaths in China by asking probing questions of Chinese.

A European journalist on a recent reporting trip to the central provinces was using her mobile phone to track down a local activist. While she was talking, a voice broke into the conversation and scolded her for sticking her nose into local affairs.

Another journalist tells of how she interviewed a source in a noisy local restaurant one evening. The next day her mobile rang and she heard the last voice she expected: her own. The call was a recording of her conversation in the restaurant.

She has no idea if it was some kind of bounce-back blip in the hi-tech spying game, or whether it was spooks wanting to let her know they were on her case. Either way, it was a jolting reminder of the system's invisible eyes and ears.

The latest technology ... is a chip that can secretly turn a mobile phone into a microphone. Security experts say the phone's software is adjusted so that when the phone is called from a certain number, it will answer automatically without ringing, vibrating or lighting up -- essentially turning it into a bugging device.

Another report in Simon's Taishi Archives gives considerably more information about what went on in Taishi Village. Pundita was particularly interested to learn that the authorities weren't only arresting the elderly who protested. Every household had somebody who was arrested. They were promised that their family members would be released if they signed a document withdrawing from the recall vote. If they refused to sign, the detained family member would go to jail for three to ten years.

So the way I figure it, we can't stop China's government from brutalizing their people; we can take a stronger stand against the brutality by -- dare I use the V word -- voting with our pocketbook.

Come to think of it, Americans could also make a stand by investing more in US companies that have branches only in democratic countries. On paper a democratic country investing business in thugocracies is supposed to move the countries toward democracy. In practice it hasn't worked out that way. And it's only encouraged despots to the idea that democracies don't really have an issue with despotic government. Such has been the case with China.

If you haven't heard the news yet, Beijing succeeded in canceling the October 7 Taishi Village recall vote on their village chieftain. Foreign reporters have been beaten up for nosing around Taishi, and the village is now under a "virtual stage of siege" according to Reporters Without Borders. If you need a refresher:

The Taishi standoff, widely seen by Chinese scholars and the legal profession as a test of local governments' commitment to village democracy and rule of law, began in July after a 100 million yuan (U.S. $12 million) land deal involving more than 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of village land. Villagers and their lawyers said accounting procedures around the sale were not transparent, and they suspected Chen of embezzling public funds.(1)

The mystery has been why China's leaders preferred to lose Face on the international stage, rather than allow one small experiment in democracy in one small village.

This year Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao made speeches overseas about their willingness to give grassroots democracy a try in China. Wen said in one speech, "If rural communities can be trusted to run their own villages, then they should also be trusted to run townships."

Yet China's central authority was unwilling to trust even one rural community to run their affairs. Beijing got their way in Taishi by ordering local authorities to conduct a "white terror" campaign against every villager who showed support for the recall vote -- and against outsiders who tried to help the villagers.

The terror campaign included death threats, intimidation and a particularly nasty kind of extortion. When the villagers finally held street demonstrations to protest Beijing's moves to stack the Taishi reelection committee, police turned a water cannon on the crowd, which included several elderly villagers. The police then arrested protesters in their 70s and 80s. Then families were told that if they voted against the recall of the chieftain, their elderly relatives would be released from jail.

The local bosses also had carte blanche to go after the legal profession. A human rights attorney working for a law firm in Beijing disappeared in September while advising Taishi's residents how to mount a legal campaign to have their elected village chief removed from office. He disappeared after he and another attorney and a law professor were chased and beaten.

The missing attorney, Guo Feixiong, turned up weeks later -- in jail, where he'd been since his disappearance. The authorities got around to formally arresting him only once rumors of his detention spread. He's being held without bail. So much for the rule of law in China.

The terror campaign extended to foreigners. A Chinese official was beaten up while he accompanied a UK Guardian reporter to Taishi -- this as a warning to the reporter to leave the village. A Malaysian reporter and a French reporter were also beaten when they showed up in Taishi, according to an October 10 report from Reporters Without Borders.

So what in blazes is really going on in Taishi Village? Are they sitting on a gold vein or a petroleum gusher, or what?

Well, it turns out that Taishi is located near a manufacuturing hub in Panyu district, in the province of Guangdong. Here readers who closely followed the China Mystery Illness will be sitting up straight.

Yes this is the very same Guangdong province where Daya Bay is situated, and where a big American trade delegation showed up, not long after two unfortunate customs officials were set upon by "black smugglers" and soon after disappeared forever -- along with their families and fancy women -- on account of being stricken with Preston Virus, oops, Ebola Virus.(2)

So now we're down to bedrock:

"The truth is that a victory in Taishi would have thrown into question the legality of a whole slew of similar property deals right across the Pearl River Delta region," U.S.-based commentator Liang Jing said on a recent broadcast on RFA's Cantonese service.

"Because an awful lot of property there is built on illegally acquired land in which the original land-rights holders -- the farmers -- had not consented to these transactions. The fierce reaction by the Guangdong authorities to the Taishi campaign shows just how clearly they realize that the Taishi issue is not an isolated phenomenon."

Liang said the authorities had to react with all their power to "avoid precipitating a wave of similar challenges to already established land deals in the event of a victory for the Taishi campaign, which would be an unthinkable scenario."(1)

Okay, let's get out our map of China and look for the Pearl River Delta. Perhaps casual observers of China have been focused on the other delta (Yangtze) which is home to Bling Bling City aka Shanghai. But to understand why Liang is not talking through his hat about the seriouness of the Taishi Village blowout, we need to know a little about the Pearl River Delta and its importance to China's global trade -- and to the foreign businesses setting up branches there.

The business is not limited to manufacturing. Shenzhen, in Guangdong, is competing with Shanghai to become China's financial hub. To do this, they have reached out to Hong Kong.

A 2003 People's Daily report is somewhat dated, but it's a clear window on China's two powerhouse delta regions, Yangtze and Pearl. A 2004 editorial in China Economic Review (Which Delta Reigns?) disputes the report's contention that Shenzhen City (Pearl River Delta) and Shanghai City (Yangtze River Delta) are in competition. However, the report is very helpful to understanding the forces at work against democracy in China at this time, so I've published it in its entirety at the end of this post.(3)

1) Radio Free Asia report: Chinese Authorities Arrest Rights Lawyer in Test Case Taishi Village

2) China's Ebola Virus reports...

3)
"March 18, 2003
by People's Daily Online reporter Li Heng
Shenzhen Pits Shanghai for China's Financial Center
To consolidate Shenzhen's status as a regional financial center, the city recently published an 18-article regulation on supporting financial development. By pitting against Shanghai the city's intention to become China's only financial center is quite apparent, expert pointed out.

The new regulation is aimed at creating a more favorable environment to bring real benefits to financial institutions, finance official of Shenzhen government told reporter recently.

Despite that, facing the growth enterprise market (GEM), which has long been called for but reluctant to show up, Shenzhen in fact slowed down its paces towards a financial center in recent two years, economist Mao Yushi pointed out. But now the city's strategy to join hands with Hong Kong is very correct.

March forward with all might
Shenzhen's financial industry took 12 percent of the city's GDP and over one fourth of the tertiary industry, its position as one of the three pillar industries in the city was further strengthened, noted Yu Youjun, Shenzhen mayor in January 2003.

What's more important is that Shenzhen government pays great attention and offers full support to the reform and development of financial industry, and is now busily studying related policies and measures to create a favorable financial environment, Yu added.

Shenzhen needs indeed new strength to improve its investment environment, and most of the articles of the regulation are new policies, but some services have already been put into operation.

According to the regulation, a financial capital management office, a consultative committee on financial policy and a special fund will be set up. The office will soon be put into operation.

How to wrestle with Shanghai?
Stressing its position as a regional financial center, how is Shenzhen going to measure its strength with Shanghai?

Generally a country has only one national financial center, even the US, said Mao. Currently China doesn't have conditions to possess two financial centers, and it has not been decided yet which will become the financial center, Shanghai or Shenzhen, and competition between the two is unavoidable.

Yet Shanghai is generally favored as a domestic financial center, Mao said, as it has a good historical background and had in fact been the financial center of the whole far-east region even before liberation. What's more, Shanghai also has more favorable conditions on its culture and state policy.

So as pointed out in its regulation, Shenzhen is to actively push forward exchanges and cooperation between overseas and domestic banking, securities and insurance industries in information, technology, service and financial innovation, as well as to deepen long-term, stable cooperation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong and strengthen ties with Hong Kong financial industry."

It has come to my attention that some visitors don't want to actually read the essays I posted about the China mystery illness but want to know how it all came out in the end. This must be the same people who read movie reviews that publish the spoiler ending. Maybe even the types who write the spoiler ending.

Now that I have that grumble off my chest, I'm reluctant to give away the "ending," to the extent there is one, because the essays are as much about news/data analysis as a mystery illness outbreak in China. So I'm hoping new readers can find the time (maybe the summer of 2006?) to look through the essays.

The intense time pressures under which American workers now operate put them in much the same position as a defense intelligence analyst or forward observer when they take in the day's news. In a world where thousands of news reports clamor daily for attention, which ones are vital to investigate?

And civilians who follow defense-related news face the same tough question that police and intelligence analysts wrestle with daily: how much meaning should be assigned to data? At what point can data be considered "information" -- data that is valuable to an objective?

The 9/11 attack illustrated both the danger of tuning out the news because "it can't be trusted" and over-reliance on "trustworthy" news sources. Four years out from 9/11, Americans on the cutting edge of news analysis (including many bloggers and their readers) have felt their way to a middle ground between those two extremes, which is highly empirical; i.e., they're looking at news stories first as data rather than information and thus, they're willing to keep adjusting their view of the data as more of it accumulates.

The China Mystery Illness essays are a journey through that type of news analysis, and a case study in how it unfolds. Pundita is not a bystander in all this; the essays follow my unfolding views on the reports. So there is an aspect to the essays that appeals to mystery novel fans.

However, I'll grant this is not news about an apple pie bake-off we're analyzing. It's serious stuff, just about as serious as it gets, and with implications for US defense and foreign policy. So it's not fair to new readers to introduce the essays without providing more information about the content.

I was sharply reminded of that yesterday while reading comments about the Chinese Puzzle essay that were posted on Dan Riehl's Riehl World View, which had linked to the essay. A reader had criticisms even though it was clear from his comments that he'd only read the introduction and not the Mystery Illness file.

So I wrote replies to the reader's comments and posted them at Dan's blog. I also decided to post the earliest replies to this blog. In this way, readers clamoring for a cheat sheet have at least a rough outline of the issues addressed in the essays.

Those who want to read all the reader's comments, click here. (While you're visiting, be sure check out Dan's link on Donald Rumsfeld's questions about China's figures on defense spending!) Then scroll to comments by "pkt" on Dan's blog. Here I only quote one part of reader "pkt's" comments.

[...] "It is interesting to note that after SARS broke out in China, there were many paranoid numbnuts in the authoritarian country (I'm an American who lives part of the year in China) that believed that SARS was a U.S. bio-engineered attack on China. [...]"

Pundita replies:

Many more Chinese suspect that the SARS virus is an experiment that jumped a biowar lab in China. Unfortunately, there are aspects of the situation that tend to support the suspicion:

First, even Beijing eventually stopped denying that the first infection had surfaced in a military hospital in China.

Second, the SARS virus seems to be a "cocktail" of older highly infectious diseases. (Unlike the mystery illness that broke out this year, medical facilities outside China have been able to obtain samples of the virus because the outbreak spread outside China.)

Third, Beijing's initial draconian attempts to cover up the outbreak, which put millions of Chinese lives at risk. This was followed by Beijing's elaborate campaign of denial and deception, which put even more millions of lives at risk -- both in China and around the world.

The suspicions were fanned this year because of a sensational speech reportedly made by a former high-ranking officer in China's military. He said in the clearest terms that biowar against the United States (with a vaccine to protect Chinese from the bioweapon) should be pursued because in coming years China will need more room to expand and the North American continent is the logical choice for China's overflow to settle down.

The source for the speech (The Epoch Times) is controversial, but it fits with the information in the book Unrestricted Warfare, which was published with the blessing of Jiang Zemin and China's military.

In any case, Beijing's draconian attempts to cover up a 'mystery' outbreak this year repeated the pattern of their actions in response to the SARS outbreak. And in this situation China refused to share medical samples. This is despite all the warnings they had been given by WHO, and the world community at large, after the SARS outbreak.

Thus, defense agencies (and intelligence analysts such as John Loftus) take the mystery outbreak very seriously, as well they should. What I did in the series of essays Dan linked to was sort through the complex and confusing reports about the outbreak, in the attempt nail down exactly what was actually known (as versus rumored and suspected).

This cleared some of the fog surrounding the reports; e.g., speculations about the most alarming claims about the nature of the mystery outbreak. Yet at this time, there is no way to rule out that the mystery illness was created in a biowar lab. Just as there is no way to rule out that the illness is caused by a 'natural' mutation of a virus (or virus/bacteria combination).

In other words, we're working blindfolded because no medical samples are available. However, militaries that use spy satellites are not entirely blindfolded. It's easy to put two and two together from my notes on Loftus' report (which form my first post on the topic). We can safely assume that the US military (and/or the CIA) was concerned about images picked up by the satellites.

So, whatever the true nature of the outbreak, something very alarming had been going on in Sichuan -- something Beijing tried to cover up. Something which seemingly had a connection to an outbreak that China's health ministry eventually claimed was strep suis bacteria. That diagnosis that flew in the face of logic on several levels, and contradicted many anecdotal reports about the symptoms of the illness.

So unfortunately, it's not paranoia that keeps the US military, China's populace, and any informed observer deeply worried about China's biowar program.
* * * * * *
I don't ignore or dispute China's role in spreading highly infectious disease. Under dispute are claims that a mystery illness appearing in Guangdong and Sichuan province this year is a strain of Ebola virus and worse, according to one anonymous report -- it's a "doomsday" virus made up in part of Bubonic plague, a strain of Ebola, and a virus (or bacteria) so strange that the doctor who described it said he couldn't name it.

After weeks of analyzing the claims -- an effort joined by translators, physicians, etc., and several readers who enjoy doing research on the Internet -- I was able to call the terrifying claims into serious question.

What's more, I was able to point out what no one in their panic had noticed: because there was absolutely no medical evidence available to determine the nature of the mystery outbreak, it wasn't possible to determine whether the outbreak was a disease!

I noted that it could have been an illness due to poisoning -- perhaps a poison substance released from an industrial accident, which are widespread in China.

As to whether there was anything about the described symptoms to suggest this possibility -- yes! Plenty! But my point was that without medical evidence in hand, it was silly to speculate, and equally silly to brand the outbreak an "infectious disease."

Yale University Online, and others who should have known better, got roped into giving serious consideration to the Ebola virus claims because they didn't do the slug work of analyzing all the published reports about the Ebola claim.

The series of essays listed in the Pundita post that Dan linked to tells the story. The story is a strong reminder to news consumers (and intelligence analysts) to do your homework -- and to keep your wits about you while taking in terrifying news.

FILM NOIR MUSIC RISES. SOUND OF RAIN ON PAVEMENT. WORLD-WEARY CYNICAL WOMAN'S VOICEOVER. CIGARETTE COUGH Cut! Cut! Dammit, Pundita, this is a family blog! From the top!

FILM NOIR MUSIC RISES. SOUND OF RAIN ON PAVEMENT. WORLD-WEARY CYNICAL WOMAN'S VOICEOVER.

Back before the war began, I had a name. Now they just call me Pundita. My beat is the Beltway, or it was, before some guy started in with a crazy story about China, but I might as well start at the start.

MUSIC AND RAIN FADE OUT.

It all began one steamy summer night. John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer, and who once held a list of security clearances as long as your arm, made a shocking announcement on a radio show heard round the U.S. and the world.

Loftus, who had retained high-level contacts in the Department of Defense and various intelligence agencies, related that he had received unconfimed reports of an epidemic and mass death in China's Sichuan province arising from a terrifying new virus.

"Think half Ebola, half AIDS," Loftus told the subsitute host for the John Batchelor Show while Batchelor was away on vacation.

The outbreak in Sichuan had followed on the heels of mass deaths of wild fowl at China's Qinghai Lake -- deaths caused by the lethal H5N1 "bird flu" virus.

Heck, even a birdbrain could put those two stories together. So I took notes.

Sometimes I wish I'd never started listening to Batchelor's show. I'm always having to explain the little wire when I'm at dinner parties in Georgetown. But war is war. I'd been tuned in since the third day of the Iraq invasion. So by that time I knew the drill backward and forward.

Loftus could only reveal open source intelligence. What is open source intelligence? In a world of shadows and rain it can mean anything. For Loftus it meant he could reveal recently declassified intelligence that was already in the public domain.

The public domain is a big place, so Loftus's contacts would sometimes steer him where to look for a needle in a haystack.

Trouble was, Loftus's contacts had been wrong before. For months he had publicly stood by his sources at CENTCOM, who stood by an informant in Saddam's regime, who swore that Saddam Hussein had been killed during the first air strike on Iraq. The informant, CENTCOM eventually learned, was a double agent.

That's the nature of intelligence work. Sometimes the data add up to something. Sometimes they don't.

On the other hand, here had never been a correction to a Loftus report that SARS had originally broken out at a military hospital in China, which would be practically a giveaway that the very odd SARS virus had started as a biowar experiment.

Since then militaries around the world, not to mention the CDC and WHO, had been jumpy about signs of weird disease outbreaks in China.

Then there was the march of H5N1. It doesn't take a biowar lab to convert H5N1 into a doomsday virus; every back yard that houses fowl and pigs together is a potential breeding ground for lethal, highly infectious virus mutations.

I shut off the radio. In the silence all that could be heard was the rasp of the air conditioner fighting the humidity outside. I went to the kitchen to pile ice into a glass of lemonade.

The way I figured it, the story was so crazy it must have come from the CIA. They never were very good at reading satellite photos. Half the time they're looking at them upside down.

So maybe they wanted help from the public in figuring out what was going on some province in China that uses a lot of chili in the cooking. They probably do this kind of thing a lot. Cheaper than hiring thousands more analysts and spending millions on software programs.

I looked at the packed suitcase near the door. I was getting ready to blow this town for a couple weeks. It was dead in Washington at this time of year, and hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement.

I lit open a pack of gum. Then I switched on the computer, went to a search engine and started reading. After a few hours I emailed John Loftus.

He could only confirm that according to his sources something very strange was going on in Sichuan province and that "large" numbers of deaths had occurred there. He couldn't confirm the nature of the illness or even whether it resulted from a virus.

I poured another lemonade. Then I thought back. It was not only the Qinghai Lake situation that might be connected with the mystery illness outbreak in China.

It just so happened the earliest anonymously published reports in China about an outbreak of Ebola coincided with an explosion of Cold War-style rhetoric between the US and China. And with a sharp escalation of angry rhetoric between Japan and China.

So was it possible the mystery illness represented a game of Chicken launched by the People's Liberation Army?

"Ha ha we have doomsday virus and vaccine. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, running dog of imperialism Rumsfeld and Tokyo toady."

Was General Cao's cadre, which had ousted Jiang Zemin's camp from the top positions in China's military during 2004, slicker than a greased pig?

Or was Jiang's loyalist camp in the PLA set on ruffling Cao's feathers by putting on a big show to embarrass him?

With the entrance of The Epoch Times into the Mystery Illness story, both possibilities had to be considered. If either or both explanations showed promise, Loftus' sources might be caught in the crossfire of a nasty foodfight at the highest levels of government in China.

There was another possibility. China's central authority was caught in the crossfire of a firefight between local power brokers and corporate giants trying to hog control of China's lucrative pork industry.

Another possibility: Beijing was locked in an Armageddon-like showdown with the bosses in Sichuan province.

Or was the PLA running around like chickens with their heads cut off simply because they were blindsided by a killer epidemic?

A problem was that there was no medical evidence to review. As usual, China's central government was practicing Denial and Deception. They had locked down Sichuan province and quashed news reports inside China that contradicted the official diagnosis of the illness, which was a streptococcus suis bacteria transmitted to humans by infected pigs.

Strep suis. "Pig feathers," I snorted, and reached for another glass of lemonade.

I ran through the options. Whatever hard evidence existed was classified. Only anecdotal reports, many of them anonymous, were available to the public. The best that could be done was keep going over the ground, hoping to spot something that had been missed. For that, as many pairs of eyes as possible were needed to help with the search.

After a moment I heaved a sigh and went to unpack the suitcase, then sat down to write a blog.

China Mystery Illness File

August 3
China Alert: mystery disease reportedly Ebola; disease spreading fast

Ebola Outbreak in China: CCP Cover-up

August 4
About Boxun

When pigs fly

A cautionary note

August 5
Correction and more cautions

August 6
HN51, Virus X and a frightening flash from the past: Spanish Flu

August 8
Pundita plays Devil's Advocate about latest viral outbreak in China

August 9
On the difference between intelligence gathering and scientific method: lesson for serious news consumers

August 10
More on pandemic: Liz does math, Pundita does cryptic, and is there a Chinese biomedical expert in the house?

August 15
A new translation of the Boxun interview about the Sichuan disease outbreak

August 16
About Boxun

Once upon a midnight dreary quoth the Raven "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

August 17
The Pig from Outer Space

Dr. Wong's fan club, rejoice!

August 18
China: Tale of Blind Men and Dragon

August 19
The power of suggestion and bao jia

August 20
China: Arsenic and Old Race

August 21
Ignorance, Knowledge and the Three Strikes Rule

August 22
Places in the Heart

August 25
The Third Man

August 28
Sleight of hand

September 30
China Ebola virus reports: finally, a break in the case

October 1
Mystery disease outbreak in Shenzhen: Casablanca Factor and bolts of lightning out of the blue

Related
The Epoch Times vs Xinhua News Agency

That doesn't close the file on China's mystery illness. And Hurricane Katrina intervened before I could share a look at China's pork industry with Pundita readers.

However, the China Mystery Illness investigation is more proof that when information exchange is democratized, when knowledge and talent are pooled and freely exchanged, the fog gets lighter. If China's government doesn't like that -- in a pig's eye will they hold up human progress.

FILM NOIR MUSIC RISES. SOUND OF RAIN.

The polls are closing in Iraq, where an estimated 15.5 million people were expected to vote on Iraq's Constitution at more than 6,000 polling places around the country. Reportedly it will take days to tally the vote.

Yesterday "Mohammed" at Iraq the Model wrote of his excitement about today's vote and told a personal recollection that underscores how far Iraq has come:

I am so excited but a flashback from Saddam’s referendum three years ago still hurts; he wanted a 100% [voter turnout] as the 99.96% of the previous one shocked the dictator. I was depressed that way and I decided not to go to the voting office and so did the rest of the family but my father was afraid that not going could be dangerous.

He said that maybe one member of the family could go alone and cast votes for the rest of us. We looked at each other thinking who’s going to volunteer to do this ugly job to protect the family. At that moment my father said “it was my generation that caused the misery we’re living in so I’m the one who should do this.”

I couldn’t stop him and I couldn’t utter a word but I felt sad for him; his sacrifice was big and I had teary eyes when I watched him taking our papers and heading out.

It is different this time father, no more 100% and a ‘no’ would make me happy just like a ’yes’ would do and no one ever will force us to do something against our will anymore.

Tomorrow will be another day for Iraqi bravery.

We haven't gotten to see much of Iraqi bravery, much less US bravery, due to the crummy job of reporting on Iraq done by the Establishment media. As to why the reporting has been so crummy -- part of the reason was revealed by US Navy Captain Chuck Nash (Ret.), a military analyst for Fox cable news.

On Wednesday Nash told John Batchelor that most of the reporters stay inside the Green Zone and pay stringers to go out and get footage for them. Chuck added that the US military keeps offering to embed the reporters but most don't accept the offer.

Why don't reporters leap at the offer? Reporter Michael Yon, who is embedded at this time in Iraq, explains the process of embedding. It makes fascinating reading. From Yon's account, it seems the answer is that it takes more dedication to good reporting than the Establishment and their megbucks advertising sponsors are generally willing to muster.

So until Iraqi TV news goes global we'll have to rely on a few dedicated reporters such as Michael Yon. And we'll have to keep improvising, if we want an idea of what is happening in Iraq aside from bloodshed. Here are some suggestions:

> Visit the "milblogs" on a routine basis -- The Fourth Rail is one I visit regularly (see Pundita blogroll) -- and check out the blogroll there and at Winds of Change and Belmont Club for lists of many good milblogs.

> Dan at Riehl World View advises to check out CENTCOM's website to gain a more balanced view of the situation in Iraq.

> Become a regular listener to John Batchelor's daily news program (see Pundita sidebar).

> Be sure to visit Good News Central, which carries on Arthur Chrenkoff's great public service of providing briefings on the "good news" from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course it's not good news for the terror masters or media organizations that can't stand the thought the US is meeting their objective in those countries. But the reports on Good News Central suggest that the vote today in Iraq went better than the Establishment media would have led us to believe.

On Wednesday the UK Guardian reported that the European Commission is backing a demand by "developing" nations that the United Nations be given oversight of the Internet. (Hat tip: Belmont Club's The Battle for the Internet.)

Viviane Reding, the European Union's IT commissioner, said that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed at a meeting in Tunisia next month, "developing" countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the Internet.

The EU plan was applauded by states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, leading the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt to express misgivings on his weblog: "It seems as if the European position has been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that should not be ours."

Carl Bilt's observation is on the mark but let us be frank; it does not take much to hijack the European position. When trade considerations are involved the European commission tends to ignore the plight of the masses ruled by despots.

Of course countries living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But since 9/11 the White House and the Congress, and even at odd times the US Department of State, have come to understand that sooner or later very harsh penalties accompany pandering to despotic governments.

Now one would think that after decades of mulling over the messes left by their colonial adventures, the Europeans wouldn't need to be lectured on that point. But here we are today, with the European Commission backing a demand by the United Nations that the EC knows full well is not about who assigns Dot Com names. They know the demand is another move to choke the little freedom of expression among peoples ruled by despots.

Up until the US response to 9/11 the European Union had their excuse: Europe was tied to the United States via NATO. If the US wouldn't stand up to tyrants who controlled very lucrative trade deals, why should the EU countries stick out their neck?

So what's their excuse, now that US has served notice on despotic governments? It revolves in part around the very limited criteria applied to categorizing "developing" nations.

It's time for the European Commission to study the list of developing nations ruled by tyrants and ask just how long it will take before they pass into the Developed Nation category. The EC should recall western Europe's nations and also Japan -- pretty much bombed to rubble by the end of World War Two -- and ask how long after the war it took those countries to move back onto the Developed Nation list.

One can argue that the war-torn countries now among the developed nations received tremendous help from the United States and US-backed institutions such as the World Bank-IMF. Yet that's just the point: to whatever extent tyrannies have "developed" during the past half century they have been carried there on the backs of free nations.

Thus, the flaw in the European argument that despotic nations should be accorded their due in the spirit of multilateralism. It's silly to give a gun to a thug then claim he has a right to hold you up at gunpoint.

Why has the European Union gotten away with that much silliness? Because they haven't had to carry the responsibility of defending themselves. That responsibility has been left to the United States of America.

So the other part of the EU's excuse is that they know the USA will always be there to save them from the worst consequences of their colonialist mindset. The thinking behind the colonial enterprises has not changed; it's just been given a new label: "multilateralism."

Multilateralism translates to accords with heads of government. In a democracy the government is the people but by convenient oversight the EU ignores that this does not hold true in a tyranny.

As to how much longer the United States can afford to put up with the EU's ruthless disregard for the rights of people in countries ruled by tyrants, I do not know. I do know that I'd have to stop and think about it, if you asked whether I'd prefer to meet Osama bin Laden or Viviane Reding in a dark alley.

Then again, the two are just flip sides of a coin called "decades of pandering."

Pundita 2005 essays (listed in order of publication) exploring problems of governing megapopulations and the implications for US foreign policy.

Stuck at the Intersection of Government and the Mass Age series

Is there a traffic engineer in the house?
Applying principles of large scale systems design to governing megapopulations.

Your village called, they're missing an idiot
Making government more responsive to new challenges.

Foreign policy and large scale systems

Seeking a field of large scale systems design
"This mystical blend of analytic and qualitative thinking about the problems of government" A decision analyst weighs in.

Getting unstuck from the intersection of government and the Mass Age

Pundita struggles to define scope of issues
Discussion with Michael Wright.

Dial 311
One tactic for getting unstuck that's already met with resounding success.

Related essays

How do you run a government when the voters are smarter than you?
What happens when a large segment of society is more knowledgeable than civil servants and elected officials?

The Elephant in the World's Living Room
Thinking in terms of a large-scale systemic problem. How did so many governments in so many diverse cultures, and with such diverse histories, end up plain crooks during this era?

"There is no box"
Bringing real democracy to world's rural peoples.

Fire up the cell phone, gather round the radio
Not by any one way does democracy come to the rural developing world.

Force vs Power and China's costly cyberwar
Horror story about incompetents running government.

A few words in praise of incompetents and their archenemies
A Boston Tea Party brewing in California: another sign that Americans are tired of mismanagement in government.

The End of Ignorance
As global communications spread in the poorer countries, a larger number of the world's population gets involved in disaster relief. Heartening implications for governing in the age of megapopulations.

If you did not see Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, you might want to stop by the MSNBC website and read the transcript of Robert Bazell's interview with Dr. Rob Webster, the physician who discovered that human flu is related to bird flu. The discovery was in 1957 but few paid attention to the implications until was too late in the day to stop a pandemic.

One fact emerged from the interview that I'd not come across before:

Webster observed, "This [H5N1] virus spreads outside the lungs to the central nervous system ... This is the first influenza virus we've seen that does this in a mammal."

I knew that H5N1 is incredibly deadly -- if I correctly recall, one of the problems with making a vaccine from the virus is that it's so powerful it kills the embryos used to culture the virus. Vaccine developers had to work around that. But I had no idea until the Bazell interview that this strain of Avian flu spreads outside the lungs.

I note that Webster did not say that CNS paralysis has accompanied human cases of H5N1 virus; he was speaking about tests done on laboratory animals. But a flu virus jumping the lungs is very bad news.

Is there anything that can be done at this late stage to ward off the pandemic, or at least slow it down? Yeah, sure. First, every government watch everything Hong Kong does in the effort to catch a breakout of the virus in the human population and do the same, as baseline efforts.

For starters, install human temperature sensors at all international airports -- the kind Hong Kong set up when they battled SARS to a standstill on the island.

The sensor is hooked to a computer screen that gives an instant temperature readout of every passenger who walks by the sensor. If the passenger has a temperature, a big red light turns on.

Sound draconian? It's a fighting chance to stop a H2H (human-to-human transmissible) mutation of H5N1 from getting on a plane 10,000 miles away and a few hours later, sitting down next to you in a coffee shop.

On that grim note, I will be on leave for the rest of the week. Until Saturday, then. Best wishes to all.

If you heard John Batchelor's Monday interview with Robert D. Kaplan, you'll get a good laugh from reading the skewed Eastern Establishment Amazon.com reviews of Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.

If you didn't catch the interview, ignore the Washington Post and Publisher's Weekly reviews at Amazon and just buy the book -- then make sure to hide it from your kids if you don't want them running off to join the military.

Batchelor's interview with Kaplan reveals the silver lining to the terror masters' war on America: the State Department and the CIA and their paranoid Cold War scheming are no longer in charge of presenting America's face to the world. And neither is the Pentagon in charge. ("The Pentagon just moves the money around now," explained Kaplan.)

So who's in charge? Small military units working under the direction of theater-level, unified combatant command units or "Coms" built on the CENTCOM concept, which was originally conceived as a rapid deployment force.

The result? All over the world, branches of the US military are gathering intelligence and promoting American ideals in the best way possible: by first gaining confidence through the sane tactic of making themselves genuinely useful to the locals.

Today's grunt is "more likely to be killed helping a civilian dig a well," than during armed combat, Kaplan explains.

Of course, US soldiers are still trained to kill people and break things, but historically neither activity has been very successful at gathering actionable intelligence and inspiring cooperation. So the Coms favor specially trained units -- sometimes as small as 4 by typically 12 in number -- which are tasked with risking their lives to do an honest day's labor in places you never even heard of.

If this sounds like the Peace Corps with firepower, let's be cautious about carrying the analogy too far. But yes, the units reflect an integration of relief work with traditional military intelligence-gathering objectives.

Kaplan explained that the realities of the present era as much as the terrorists have driven the shift. Today, the US must operate in many countries that are, at least on paper, democracies -- places such as Yemen and the Philippines. Governments in such countries won't stand for Cold War CIA-type machinations against factions playing footsie with terrorist/ anti-democracy groups. But if the US military wants to make themselves useful, while at the same time coaching factions resisting the bad guys, they are welcome to set up camp.

Thus, the title of Kaplan's book is somewhat misleading. Today, America is not so much an imperial power as a hegemonic one. Hegemony is maintained not through flashy imperial displays of military force but through sheer hard work.

This approach is not glamorous but there's a romance about it that appeals to the missionary side of America's character and reflects the American work ethic. It's also very dangerous work, so it's not surprising to learn from Kaplan that the US soldiers he met with display nobility of character. "It seems a sense of danger builds character," he observed.

Kaplan told Batchelor that he was struck by the "selflessness" he found among unit members. He observed that his East Coast Literary Establishment world of obsessive self promotion is the antithesis of the one he found while embedded with special forces units. The individual doesn't really exist in the mind of unit members, Kaplan noted. "The unit exists."

Is this observation bad news for fans of Ayn Rand's philosophy of rugged individualism? I'd say no; the stories Kaplan told John Batchelor suggest that the high ethical standards, self-reliance and leadership qualities in Rand's fictional heroes are well represented in the soldiers Kaplan got to know. Kaplan's stories reveal that the new military has taken up the slack created by our educational institutions' failure to teach ethics to a generation of American schoolchildren.

Also, as Rand famously observed, before you can be a person who does things for others you must first be a person who knows how to get things done. Those serving in the new military are taught to get things done amidst tribal rivalries and clan alliances in regions that are centuries behind the times in developed countries.

And don't be fooled by one Amazon reviewer's depiction of what Kaplan has to say about where these new soldiers come from in America; i.e., from "...predominantly working- or lower-middle-class folk, the products (with the exception of West Point and Annapolis) of state schools and part-time degree programs."

Kaplan told Batchelor that the soldiers he met were predominately from families with a history of military service. They are Americans raised in a family tradition that American ideals are worth dying to defend.

So the new military reflects a cross-section of backgrounds: children of immigrants from around the globe, working class families from all across America, ethnic minorities from poor households as well as WASPs raised in privilege. The common thread in many backgrounds is service to America.

On a more abstract level, the value of the special units to the US military's intelligence gathering applies a dictum of the best-run business enterprises. "The better a system, the more decentralized it is," observed Kaplan.

The 9/11 attack tragically demonstrated the limits of the highly centralized, NATO-oriented command structure. That approach blinded a series of US presidential administrations and congressional committees to what was really happening in the world outside NATO's home base of Western Europe.

Of course the military objective is not the same as the profit-making goal of private enterprise, so decentralization of operations does have its downside when applied to the military. Yet in a world where accurate, timely observations are the key to winning against a highly decentralized enemy, the decentralized operations approach is vital to supplement electronic spying and correct wrong theories in Washington about how things are going in the world.

The interview ended with a few observations about America's failed quest in Iraq -- failed, to hear the Establishment media tell it. Kaplan observed with a chuckle that Iraq's Sunnis are signing up "in droves" to vote and that, "Iraq is no longer a military problem, it's a governance one." He added that the terrorist bombings are "statistically meaningless" to this big picture.

No matter how the vote on Iraq's Constitution goes, it's going to happen despite al Qaeda's best attempts to derail it. In a land that for millennia accepted despotism and oppression as an inevitable fact of life, the Iraqi voters, with help from America's grunts, are the dawn of a new day.

It's a new day for America as well. While there is still plenty of intrigue in intelligence gathering, the new military is following the adage that you get back what you put out. If the Cold War produced in many foreign quarters the view that America is full of tricks and can't be trusted, that was a reflection of the CIA-MI6 way of doing things so chillingly depicted in John Le Carre's novels.

The new approach to intelligence gathering is more in synch with the values that make the United States of America a beacon to the world's oppressed. More than all the propaganda, the approach will return many times to America in fond feelings and respect.

Lest you think Kaplan's account is only for military buffs, here I grudgingly allow Amazon.com a few words:

He has now written a book about several years of visiting with the troops at the far corners of the American Empire ... As befits such a global tour, Kaplan is a very good travel writer indeed. He superbly describes bazaars and rainforests, brothels and junkyards, hootches and bases, M-4 carbines and M-240 machine guns, heat and dust. He captures in a few pages what it takes to train a moderately competent sergeant or plan an assault on Fallujah.

Come to think of it, maybe it's not just the children running off you'd have to worry about. Better not read Imperial Grunts if you think you might kick yourself for being too old, or too saddled with civilian responsibility, to join the new military.

Yesterday a grief-stricken man in Pakistan sorrowfully told a reporter, "I don't know why all these disasters are happening all around the world now."

But these disasters have always been going on; it's just that now many people in Pakistan and other developing countries can see them, thanks to 24/7 satellite TV news coverage. So while my heart goes out to that man I have to tell him: "Welcome to my world."

We here in the United States, the majority of us, were raised on televised images of suffering worldwide. Images of people the world over crushed by Nature's unfolding schedule of events and the cruelty of despotic regimes: drought and flood, earthquake and famine, genocide and mass executions.

Americans watched their TVs then opened their hearts and pocketbooks. Americans gave and gave and gave, regardless of the recipients' race, clan and religious creed. They gave to countless millions of complete strangers, and with no reason for giving other than to help. Most of the givers weren't rich.

That's how it's been for the majority of Americans for about four decades. It's been the same in West Europe. But for most of the world, it has not been that way.

Only very recently have people in the world's poorest countries had a chance to get a wide-angle view of the world -- and only in regions where there is enough freedom for citizens to be allowed satellite TV.

What has this meant? Well, it's meant that people in African and Asian villages knew before Michael Brown that Americans stuck in the Superdome were starving. They watched the horror unfold on their television sets along with Americans watching their TV sets in horror.

It's meant that people in villages in Latin America and the Middle East have sat through testimony of rape victims in Darfur.

It's meant that people throughout the developing world watched in sorrow and sympathy as survivors of the Bam earthquake wept for their dead, and as aid workers pleaded for help in flooded Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

It's meant that the world is watching in suspense and hope as Pakistanis and Indians, and aid workers from around the world, struggle to pull the living from collapsed buildings.

So it's not surprising, if many in the poorest countries are suddenly feeling that something new and horrible is at work in the world. Heck no; if you've been watching TV news for decades you know that killer floods and earthquakes are the normal course of Nature's business. You know that Nature's business is conducted with no attention to humanity's frailties and with no prejudice whatsoever toward our races, clans and creeds.

If you've been watching the nightly news for decades, you can recite chapter and verse one atrocity after another done by humans to other humans around the globe.

The world is not coming to an end. What is ending is humanity's ignorance of just how much suffering is spread around the world.

With the end of ignorance must come a more equitable shouldering of responsibility to pitch in and help during times of trouble. One can always give a little something, even if one can only fold hands in prayer. Many hearts and hands make light work.

Those who pooh-poohed President Bush's October 6 words about the scope of the threat posed by Islamic terror organizations have not followed the news closely. And Americans who have made a career out of downplaying al Qaeda's threat will have a hard time explaining away the Ad Dammam cell.

However, wall-to-wall US news coverage of Katrina meant that very few Americans learned of the Saudi strike against an al Qaeda cell in the town of Ad Dammam, and the evidence the strike turned up.

The September 6 strike, which ended a two-day standoff, killed all five cell members inside the seaside villa. But it was what the police found in addition to the bodies and weapons cache ("enough weapons for a couple of platoons of guerrilla fighters") that alarmed governments around the world. And would have sent oil traders into a fresh panic if they hadn't been distracted by hurricanes in the US Gulf. Christopher Dickey reports for the October 3 issue of NEWSWEEK:

According to a Saudi Interior Ministry statement [the evidence] included forged passes to enter "important locations."

The Saudi daily Okaz quoted the minister, Prince Nayef, saying the cell -- which was linked directly to Al Qaeda -- had planned major attacks on some of Saudi Arabia's key oil and gas facilities.

"There isn't a place that they could reach that they didn't think about," said Nayef.

And their ultimate target was the global economy. Saudi Arabia is the greatest source of oil on earth, with a quarter of known reserves and a proven policy of trying to stabilize prices even in today's volatile markets. [...]

Precisely what the Dammam cell intended to hit, if known, has not been revealed in any detail. But as NEWSEEK sources pointed out, Saudi Arabia is a target-rich environment.

Certain critical nodes in the general vicinity of Ad Dammam have worried American strategists for years. Past studies suggest a moderate-to-severe attack on the Abqaiq oil-processing facilities, for instance, could cut Saudi output (now about 9.6 million barrels a day) by more than 4 million barrels for two months or more.

Al Qaeda has used suicide boats before. A successful hit against a major offshore loading facility at either Ras Tanura or Juaymah would knock millions of barrels off the market.

[Former CIA agent Robert] Baer wrote in 2003 that "a single jumbo jet with a suicide bomber at the controls ... crashed into the heart of Ras Tanura, would be enough to bring the world's oil-addicted economies to their knees." [...]

Lest you think closing down the Ad Dammam cell represents a lasting victory for the Saudi police, new cells seem to spring up almost as soon as the old ones are closed down.

But that is not surprising given the history of Saudi police interrogation of al Qaeda suspects. So many al Qaeda suspects have been killed resisting arrest that it's a running joke among Western intelligence agents.

Consider the Dammam cell. After 48 hours of the police force's "light" artillery shelling of the seaside villa, the roof collapsed, which ended the standoff. But the people inside were dead before the roof came down. The remains were so charred and reduced to jell by artillery fire that it took DNA tests to establish exactly how many people were inside the house. This is no way to extract intelligence on al Qaeda activities in Saudi Arabia.

Cynics would observe that's just the point: dead men tell no tales. True, there are opposing factions inside the House of Saud, which means that despite the threat to the Saudi government from al Qaeda, the terror organization still has their uses to factions that want Abdullah off the Saudi throne.

So one can understand the reluctance at the highest levels of government to adopt negotiation tactics favored by American big city police when they face a standoff.

However, given the scary evidence turned up by the Dammam raid, Pundita wonders whether the ruling faction might want to consider the kind of tactics that are dear to American district attorneys going after Mafia bosses.

They might want to adopt a policy of trying to capture al Qaeda suspects -- or rather "deviants," as the Saudi royals prefer to call them -- and offer amnesty or at least leniency if a suspect is willing to make a deal. And put out the word that they'll be offering milk and cookies to suspects instead of torture.

Even if captured suspects sit with arms folded after munching their cookies and say, "Nope, I won't rat" -- al Qaeda commanders couldn't be sure of that. There is great tactical value in the enemy having to make alterations based on his concern that an operative is talking.

Those who would point out that the Dammam operatives had enough firepower to make it unlikely they'd agree to negotiate would be ignoring the history of police action in Saudi Arabia. And they would ignore the vast, generously paid network of spies working for the Saudi government.

Darn tootin the Dammam cell wouldn't negotiate. They knew they'd be killed resisting arrest, even if they came out with their hands up and waving a white flag.

These things keep happening in Saudi Arabia. A police battalion armed to the teeth with "light" artillery happens to be out for a stroll in a certain neighborhood. Suddenly a cop's eyes roll in his head and he shrieks, "I'm having a vision of deviants holed up in that house we just passed!"

Knock! Knock! "Who's there?" The Saudi police coming to check on a vision.

Gimme a break. The police had that seaside villa, and the deviants inside, under observation for days or weeks, if not months. The police could have picked off those five men outside the villa -- away from the arms cache. But unlike the dead, the living do tell tales.

Here is one of the biggest obstacles to putting al Qaeda out of business: the Saudi government is so sure that the United States military will come to rushing to their aid in the event of a big strike on their oil wells, they know they can clown around with impunity.

Washington is very much aware of this. But a Mexican standoff is in effect: every time the White House asks the Saudis to interrogate al Qaeda suspects instead of killing them, the Saudis retaliate. One way they do this by spreading stories that the US presence in Iraq is keeping al Qaeda going. This is despite the fact that the last thing Saudi King Abdullah wants is to see the US quit Iraq. At the bottom of it all is struggles for power within the House of Saud.

Is there a way to end the standoff? Well, President Bush, with backing from the Congress, could order the US Department of State to tell the Saudis, "Hey listen, if the oil wells fall into al Qaeda's hands, we'll just have to open diplomatic negotiations with those deviants. Maybe they won't be so much trouble once they're running your country."

That would get things moving in Riyadh. As to whether State would obey the order: yeah sure, if you went into Foggy Bottom with a tank division to deliver the order. Otherwise, the hired help in the White House and Congress do not instruct the mandarins who run America's foreign affairs. And the hired help in the Pentagon and US soldiers can clean up whatever messes the mandarins make in the process.

If you tell me I'm proposing a game of Chicken in place of a standoff -- I am proposing that Washington finally confront palace politics in a polygamous kingdom.

Those oil wells so precious to the democratic world are owned by one big family of half-brothers who do not hesitate to murder each other in a bid for power. The only thing that will force cooperation in such a family is if they think the "Blue-eyed genie," as King Fahd once referred to American troops, won't play the maid.

In the longest speech he has ever given, yesterday President George W. Bush made specific retorts to arguments that cite Islamic principles as justification for terrorism. That is a first for an American president.

The extraordinary speech, given before the National Endowment for Democracy, represents other firsts as well. The speech:

> revealed the number of major al Qaeda plots that have been foiled since 9/11;

> clarified that US troops would not voluntarily withdraw from Iraq even if limited military objectives in the country were met; and

> restated the limited US "War on Terror" on al Qaeda's terms; i.e., publicly recognized al Qaeda's stated plans to establish a global caliphate via armed conquest of the West and framed the US response accordingly.

If that last sounds terribly ominous -- a de facto declaration of World War Three -- on the contrary. Bush's speech was simply a bow to the Arab Street, which has been buzzing with rumors that the US is planning to cut and run from Iraq -- and which has long held that the United States won't stay in the Middle East to see the larger job through and that the Bush administration is clueless about what al Qaeda is really up to in Iraq.

So the speech was to set the rumors to rest, to give assurance that the United States is in for the long haul, and to demonstrate that the United States government is abreast of al Qaeda's plans.

The game is up in Iraq for al Qaeda and they know it. They made two critical miscalcuations:

> They didn't predict that His Honorable Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani would emerge as Iraq's George Washington. (No one could have predicted that.)

> They didn't factor in that the vast majority of Iraqi people, whose patience had been honed under Saddam's long brutal rule, would show such tenacity under the onslaughts of terrorist bombs.

All that's left now for the terror masters is to throw what's left of their bombs at innocent Muslims and stoke the rumor that the US is quitting Iraq at the first opportunity.

President Bush's ringing words yesterday will go a long way to quashing the rumor. And the US military working alongside Iraq's will run the varmits out of Iraq.

As for al Qaeda's talk about a global caliphate: on her "listening mission" in the Middle East, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, listened very carefully with fresh ears (and her long experience as a professional reporter) to the many Muslims who advised her about their concerns. And she very carefully reported to President Bush all she was told. Pundita doubts she reported that what the world's Muslims want is to establish a global caliphate.

So I'd say the puppetmasters in Tehran have also miscalculated. They definitely got it wrong, if they assumed that no US President would ever dare confront the totalitarian cant in Wahabist dogma for fear of bringing on the wrath of the Muslim world. Americans, it's to be remembered, practically invented war against totalitarian regimes.

"Pundita:
Regarding your "Force vs Power" essay: a very concise analysis. I'm sure that you have also considered one of the minor theme variants on this 'exhaustion of civilization' text, and that is merit vs connections. I keep wondering when the auction of general staff positions at the Pentagon will start. But they may not need an auction, when the currency of power seems to be swaggering bluster and dogma over reason. I can see the future now, a glittering technological society where nothing works right....
E"

Dear E:
Yes, but I comfort myself by thinking thusly: If competence triumphed we might attain heaven on earth. So the tradition of putting well-connected dolts in charge serves a divine purpose.

And consider: When it comes time to ring down the curtain on the human race, we might hope that a dolt is charged with overseeing the termination sequence.

However, the #1 reason to be philosophical about incompetents is that they make the perfect scapegoat when ordinarily competent people screw up.

If that's too much philosophizing for you, Pundita stands by the thesis I laid down in How do you run a government when the voters are smarter than you? and the series of essays titled Stuck at the intersection of government and the Mass Age:

For the first time in history large numbers of people are smarter and better educated than the elites in government. That translates to far less tolerance for incompetence and the traditions of promoting according to tenure and connections.

Any doubt that reason is making headway against bluster, consider how long Michael Brown stayed in his top post at FEMA once his job history was made public.

Also consider Bruce Kesler's October 6 report for Democracy Project (emphasis mine):

SurveyUSA just released a poll taken between September 30 and October 2. Not only does Proposition 75 now lead with 60% of likely voters, but the other Propositions have surged. Proposition 75 requires that public employees give annual permission for dues or fees to be payroll deducted for political campaigns, which will seriously dent liberal power in California and national elections

Proposition 74 is now supported by 55% of likely voters, to extend the probationary period for new teachers from 2 years to 5 years, and makes it easier to dismiss teachers with unsatisfactory performance evaluations.

Proposition 76 is now supported by 58% of likely voters. It limits the growth in state spending to not exceed recent growth in state revenues.

Proposition 77 is now supported by 59% of likely voters. It takes redistricting of Congressional and state legislative districts away from the Democrat-packed legislature and turns it over to a panel of retired judges. Common Cause today, also, came out in favor.

Bruce closes with the grim warning that the unions still have a month and many millions to fight the propositions. However, what happens in California politics is a bellwether for the rest of the country and from there, the rest of the world. Slowly but just as surely, American voters are making gains against institutionalized tolerance for incompetence.

Finally, consider the impact of the Internet. Before he was a moral coward and a man of no business ethics, Eason Jordan was simply incompetent. He couldn't think of any way to protect his CNN reporters in Iraq, other than collaborating with Saddam Hussein's regime.

Set aside Dan Rather's sacrifice of journalistic ethics to partisan politics. He didn't even do the most basic research on the 'evidence' brought to him about Bush's National Guard Record.

In fact, Rather didn't even need to do the research himself to do his job; all he needed was to turn the data over to a firm that specializes in examining forensic evidence and say, "Check it out."

As to how quick the turnaround would have been: the scariest aspect of Rathergate is that Rather's defenders didn't understand at first just why the blogosphere was so quick at calling out CBS over the evidence presented:

The bloggers who were quickest to catch the discrepancies were people who worked for firms that examine such evidence daily. It only took them moments to spot discrepanies!

So before he was a Democrat party hack who abused his position at CBS, Dan Rather was also getting paid megabucks to sleep on the job.

When Jordan and Rather were challenged by blogosphere researchers, their initial response to probing questions was the same one that didn't endear Marie Antoinette to the French masses. Well, Jordan and Rather were soon gone from their posts.

I note that more recently the patient efforts of one blogger, Dan at Riehl World View, have exposed incompetence at Fox cable and CNN in their reporting on the Natalie Holloway case.

To argue that Fox and CNN were simply intent on titillating the public is to imply that they were capable of doing thorough research on the Holloway story. There is nothing in the reporting to support that argument.

The above are but three examples from a long and fast-growing list of incidents that illustrate why the Internet makes it harder by the hour to get away with incompetence, whether it exists in the private or public sector.

So it's no wonder that incompetents the world over are calling for regulation of the Internet. But being incompetents, they have greatly miscalculated.

Too many people the world over who cherish competence are now working too hard to keep carrying the career incompetents on their back. And now those hard-working people have the means to investigate and quickly communicate on the patterns that give evidence of entrenched incompetence and the stonewalling that goes with it.

I know it can be hard to keep the faith that reason ultimately triumphs over dogma. But the defense of reason, as with the defense of freedom and civilization, is a process not a goal.

There is no impregnable fortress. There is no winning. There is just unending watchfulness and effort. Because in this uncertain world you can be certain of one thing: Dogma will never sign the terms of surrender.

"Pundita, regarding your post yesterday, it seems you think the Chinese leaders are still following Mao Zedong's dictum that "All political power comes from the barrel of a gun." If that's how they're thinking, I wonder when it will occur to them that the greatest political power comes from the people.
Margaret in Tulsa"

Dear Margaret:
Good observation, provided you're not confusing power with force; because many do confuse the two concepts this seems a good opportunity to review the differences.

Do you recall seeing the news footage of an attorney who provoked an assailant intent on shooting him to death at close range into emptying the gun in wild shots? The attorney was wounded and of course he was lucky but if ever there was an illustration of the inherent limitation of force, that situation was textbook.

Force can rather easily exhaust itself because its energy source can be very limited, and because so much energy must be expended in the process of applying force.

Power, on the other hand, comes from the ability to do work; it is quite literally predicated on how much energy is available for an activity.

Those who govern by force are actually in a very weak position because so much of their energy goes into applying force, which only returns the need to apply more force.

Those who govern by ability are powerful because their accomplishments replenish and return their energy expenditures.

Mao mistook force for power. He and his cadre expended so much energy using force that they could not effectively govern, and so the Chinese people starved. They were saved by intervention of Western governments and notably America.

Laws and treaties are necessarily backed by force of arms. However, politics is dictated by the society's survival issues. Such are rarely treated effectively by force.

Saddam Hussein was an incompetent administrator; the model of governing he used was inherited from European colonial times, which saw administration to relatively small human populations under simple conditions. That model of governing isn't fit for administering to a large, highly complex society.

The situation represented by Hussein's goverment has occurred, to greater or lessor extent, in virtually all regions that inherited the colonial model of administration, and where the human population skyrocketed due to vaccines and antibiotics.

During the 20th Century the knee-jerk response of many who inherited the colonial model was to manage the problems of a burgeoning complex society through massacres, thereby winnowing the population to more manageable size, or through the application of force.

That set in motion a cycle whereby more and more force had to be used, which diverted more and more energy from the task of finding and implementing effective governing solutions. The massive power drain inevitably led to the collapse of the government unless there was a significant external factor in play.

In Saddam's case, he controlled large oil resources coveted by foreign governments. So the governments found ways to help prop up his government, even during the UN embargo.

The overthrow of Saddam's regime opened the door for Iraqis to modernize their government administrations and supplant force with competence in government. So what's going on in Iraq is symbolic of the closing of an old chapter in humanity's history and the opening of a new one. Fitting that this should occur in one of the cradles of civilization. And fitting that a land peopled by immigrants from all over the world should have acted as midwife to the rebirth.

An October 4 Epoch Times article, China's Cyber War, succinctly illustrates how government by force drains massive amounts of energy and thus, power from government:

By conservative estimates Beijing has spent $800 million on their "Golden Shield Project," manned by 50,000 cyber cops, which has the express purpose of forcing China's Internet users to conform to Beijing's dictates on proper use of the Net.

That expenditure and marshaling of manpower is a drop in the bucket next to what will be needed to force compliance in coming years because China needs the Internet. As millions and millions more Chinese come online, Beijing will be forced to spend trillions of USD and divert much more manpower to the deployment of force!

Seen from the long view the situation has a slapstick quality; it's akin to the problems faced by emperors who were forced to retain guards to watch the guards and spies to watch the guards who watched the guards and spies to watch the spies!

Then schoolchildren ask, "Why did so many ancient civilizations collapse?"

Through sheer exhaustion, in many cases. The principle of force in governing drains the very power needed to keep a society rising to new challenges.

Governing by force is coming to the end of the line in human affairs simply because it wastes so much energy. We've raised up societies of such complexity and scale that tremendous power is needed to manage them -- a power that comes from ability, not the force of a gun.

With so many appeasers in the running it was a tough choice, but Yahoo.com finally nosed ahead of the pack.

With assistance from Yahoo's Hong Kong office, Beijing secured an email from Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, which proved he'd posted information about the Tianamen Square massacre on an overseas website. Yahoo's help netted, if you'll pardon the expression, a 10-year prison sentence for Shi Tao.

The Neville Chamberlain Prize is a potbellied urn painted a tasteful yellow color with ashes of copies of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights sealed inside.

"Way cool! We're thrilled and proud to receive this recognition of our efforts to further America's cooperation with China's government," commented a spokesperson for Yahoo! Holdings Ltd. in Hong Hong who asked not to be named. "But which ISP does Neville Chamberlain work for?"

Yahoo's part in Shi Tao's arrest and April 30 conviction is old news to Internet watchdogs, democracy/human rights supporters and defenders of press freedoms. However, Yahoo's willing -- I emphasize willing -- collaboration with China's police state takes on new urgency in light of the rout of democracy in Taishi Village and Beijing's forcible closing of a Chinese website that reported on the situation.

What's striking about the Yahoo! situation is that they were not under legal obligation to cooperate with China's police in the Shi Tao matter. According to Reporters Without Borders (emphasis mine):

[...] the verdict reveals that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account [...] and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer.

Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) is subject to Hong Kong legislation, which does not spell out the responsibilities in this kind of situation of companies that provide e-mail services.

Nonetheless, it is reportedly customary for e-mail service and Internet access providers to transmit information to the police about their clients when shown a court order. [...]

For years Yahoo! has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored. In 2002, Yahoo! voluntarily signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry", agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. [...](1)

So the wording of the documents Yahoo! signed gave them plenty of wiggle room to not cooperate with the "custom" of foreign companies complying with a police order claiming jurisdiction over the Internet.

Yet clearly, they were under some kind of pressure from China's authorities to comply with custom. However, the pressure was just as clearly not spelled out. The reported custom was not committed to writing, much less a legally binding document. So what is China really up to? Watch carefully, don't blink:

If you study the pattern of China's actions regarding Internet restrictions, it jumps out that China's government is not spending mega-yuan to go after postings to websites that the vast majority of Chinese citizens never see. They are using the cooperation of foreign computer companies to help them establish a body of legal precedents, which shore their case for government control of the Internet.

To what end? China's government is cleverly using the rule of law against the very countries that govern according to the rule of law. They are using the rule of law in the same way Hitler did: to help them legitimize a rule by military force.

In the years during the runup to Germany's invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler took pains to provide other European governments with numerous opportunities to lodge formal protests that had clout behind them.

Each time an opportunity was not taken, this only emboldened Hitler's forces. The same pattern is in evidence with the People's Republic of China. They find no resistance whenever they push against the Western democracies even though China always provides clear openings for the democracies to push back.

How to respond to China's version of Hitler's ploy? Well, today's Western transnational corporations don't have the kind of management that fits them to stand up to anything bigger than a stiff breeze. So at least in America, it's past time for the US Department of State and the Congress to step up to the plate.

The Congress needs to summon Yahoo! and their American corporate fellow travelers before a commission and tell them, "You don't have to volunteer be a collaborator. Ring up the Congress, the next time you get the idea that to keep doing business in China you have to abide by every Chinese custom."

Congress also needs to summon Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a closed-door hearing and explain that no matter how many careers she has to destroy at State, America's foreign office needs to stop playing China's door mat.

Also, US senators who keep abreast of doings in China by relying on expert opinion from US policy institutes that are apologists for China's dictatorship need to instruct their aides to cross those sources off their list.

1) From a Reporters Without Borders report on the verdict in Shi Tao's case. According to the report:

Shi Tao worked for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News). He was convicted on 30 April of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal message which [China's] authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilisation and risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

For more information on the Yahoo-Shi Tao situation, click on the above link.

“It really was one of the last resources left to us -- one of the last bastions of justice and social conscience for academics and rights activists alike,” Hou said. “A forum like that is really very rare in China. This really is a very big attack by the government on rights campaigners.”

The following is an October 3 report posted on the Radio Free Asia website. (This is a site to bookmark.)

For background on the importance of one small village in China, read It's really over for Taishi at Simon World.

HONG KONG: The Chinese authorities have shut down a popular online news and discussion forum that gave prominent coverage to a campaign by villagers in the southern province of Guangdong to remove their elected chief amid corruption allegations, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.

The Yannan forum, known in China as a BBS, carried an announcement dated Sept. 30, 2005, announcing that the Web site had now closed. The site, popular among academics, journalists, and rights activists, had previously had all Taishi-related news reports and discussions removed from public view.

“Yannan will be undergoing a complete clean-up and rectification, and its relaunch will be notified at a later date. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience,” the announcement said.

An employee at Yannan confirmed the closure to RFA Cantonese service reporter Mei Kin-kwan. “Yes, we are closed,” he said. “Sorry, I can’t give any interviews to the media. I won’t say anything else. Just wait for our statement, ok?

A major blow
Beijing-based rights activist Hou Wenzhuo, whose non-governmental group has been following events in Taishi village closely, said Yannan’s closure came as a major blow.

“It really was one of the last resources left to us—one of the last bastions of justice and social conscience for academics and rights activists alike,” Hou said. “A forum like that is really very rare in China. This really is a very big attack by the government on rights campaigners.”

China issued a revised set of regulations governing Internet news content last week, which observers said were aimed at tightening controls on information related to demonstrations and street protests on Web sites, bulletin boards and Web logs, or blogs.

The regulations target sites that publish fabricated information or pornography and forbid content that “harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, (and) undermines national unity.”

They also ban posts that “instigate illegal gatherings, formation of associations, marches, demonstrations, or disturb social order,” indicating a lesson learned from anti-Japanese protests that swept China last April and spread in part due to postings on Internet bulletin boards and chat rooms.

Test of grass-roots democracy
The Taishi standoff, widely seen by Chinese scholars and the legal profession as a test of local governments’ commitment to village democracy and rule of law, began in July after a 100 million yuan (U.S. $12 million) land deal involving more than 2,000 mu (133 hectares) of village land.

Villagers and their lawyers said accounting procedures around the sale were not transparent, and they suspected Chen of embezzling public funds. In clashes earlier this month, riot police ended a hunger strike and fired water cannon on protesters, many of them elderly, prompting widespread outrage among ordinary Chinese with access to news reports of the incident.

Last month, villagers fought against government attempts to stack the re-election committee in its favor, electing seven of their own candidates ahead of a key vote slated for Oct. 7 on whether village chief Chen Jinling should remain in office.

But a concerted pressure campaign by local officials from the next two levels of government above Taishi has resulted in the resignation of all seven representatives to date, residents told RFA. Unconfirmed reports say detained villagers were released in return for signatures on a petition supporting Chen.

“They mobilized more than 100 people,” one male villager, who asked not to be named, told RFA Mandarin service reporter Yan Ming. “Each production team enlisted the relatives of each team member to beg, cheat, and frighten people. They used every possible method. The result was that more than 390 people agreed to withdraw from the campaign to remove the village chief, although we really don't know the true figure.”

Hou, in an earlier RFA panel discussion on rural rights campaigns, said any optimism that the Taishi standoff would result in better protection from rights abuses for rural communities was misguided.

Call for power-sharing
“Without even the tiniest amount of power-sharing, there is no hope at all that ordinary citizens will have their basic rights protected. China’s rural communities make up 80 percent of the population, but in terms of political power, it’s really less than 10 percent,” she told RFA’s Mandarin service.

“Why has a tiny village election in Taishi escalated to this stage? Because the authorities have remained implacable in the face of support from academics, from journalists and the legal profession,” said Hou, an activist with the Beijing-based Empowerment and Rights Institute.

“They won’t budge an inch, because there has been no change, not even a small adjustment, in the structures of power,” she said.

Replying to Hou, Beijing Institute of Technology economics professor Hu Xingdou said central government had to tread a delicate path with local officials: “I think the government has its own problems. For example, local governments are the grassroots of the Party, and it can’t afford to alienate them entirely.”

“But in the case of such obvious violence and wrongdoing as we saw in Taishi village, I think the central government should use its power to intervene,” Hu said."

Original reporting in Cantonese by Mei Kin-kwan, and in Mandarin by Shi Shan and Yan Ming. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie, and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

Eric T. Miller, one of Pundita's favorite WOMS,* reports in his latest column at Tom Brown's Bankstocks about two recent lectures given by experts on Europe and European foreign relations.

The speakers were Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, the German weekly, and Dennis Bark, author of several books on Europe and its relations with the United States.

Mr. Miller's summary ranges over discussions about deteriorated US-European relations (and reminds of some bright spots in those relations) and looks at how the experts view the German election.

He also passes along observations about demographics and work habits in Germany, which I found striking in light of the demographics-based analysis of China and Iran I highlighted in yesterday's posts:

Josef Joffe asserted that Europe is dying because of its demographics. No European country has a birth rate that’s above the replacement rate -- which means that the population of Europe is headed toward long-term decline. Italy has the lowest birth rate. If Russia were to be included in the overall picture, the aging of Europe is even more dramatic.

In the past, there has been a close correlation between growth in the labor force and overall economic growth; Europe thus seems condemned to slow growth at best unless there’s some amazing breakthrough in productivity. Considering European labor intransigence and work attitudes, that doesn’t seem likely.

Both Joffe and Bark said that the one necessary ingredient for Europe to thrive again economically is for it to work much harder, which would mean wholesale changes in work habits and rules. If the Social Democrats retain an important almost role in the next German government, the opportunity for change in that country seems limited.

Joffe said that the Social Democratic mindset is entrenched, and that Social Democrats are intolerant of ideas other than their own. They remain determined to maintain the social welfare system in its entirety. Their central emphasis is on equality; they give short shrift to incentives that might spur growth.

To date, any assault on the Europeans’ welfare systems has come about as a result of the outside forces of globalization and Europeanization, but those assaults haven’t made any difference. If anything, Germany has moved further to the left, according to Joffe. And the country is further handicapped by the drag of the former East Germany, which, because so many people are on the dole there, is costing the country 4% of GDP. Joffe observed that the country is hooked on the welfare system; people are like junkies dependent on government assistance.

Here we find another example of Nature trumping ideology. Political, social and economic philosophies tend not to give much attention to climate changes that force large migrations and the social upheavals that accompany a steep decline in a settled population.

That observation holds as true for European socialist philosophy as for Chinese communism and Islamic theories of government. It holds true for philosophizing, in general.

(For those who argue that the revealed word of the divine is the best philosophy to guide human affairs: when the well dries up, there is Revealed Word that can't get lost in translation.)

During periods when Nature allows for stability in human affairs, people have great latitude in choosing what they wish to believe, and often without undue penalty. It's when Nature presents a reality check that the penalties can pile up fast if people are unwilling to make adjustments in their philosophy.

The advice from Bark and Joffe that the Germans must work harder to compensate for the decline in their population is a good reminder about bottom-line issues for humanity.

Societies might have the means to rise to a challenge from natural forces, if they choose to deploy them. This is provided they deploy the means within the window of opportunity time permits. The window generally does not stay open long.

To read the rest of Mr. Miller's report titled Old Europe click here.

* Wise Old Men of Wall Street

Pundita:
Regarding your China by the numbers post. On the idea of "grass roots" or village democracy, there has just been an attempt at it in a small village called Taishi. Naturally, the idea of the villagers electing their own outside the authorised channels was squashed. Even more surprisingly, this wasn't really reported in the Western media. Here's some links to give you the background:

Taishi and China loses

It's really over for Taishi

Simon in Hong Kong"

Dear Simon:
While visiting the second link I noted your comment about the Hong Kong meeting to discuss Mainland politics that was canceled. To read that the mere acts of advertising a meeting and reporting on its cancellation are acts of courage in China is frightening.

Pundita finds nothing surprising in the Western media's reluctance to report on the rout of an attempt at democracy in China and the implications. If the Western media face the truth about China they must also face the truth about Western democracy.

The Western democratic nations didn't create repression in China but by acting as apologists and fellow travelers they did what the Chinese Communist Party could not: vetted China's repressive regime in the eyes of the world.

I wonder what the so-called advanced democracies thought they accomplished by that act? What did they accomplish in Burma? Iran? Saddam's Iraq? In Africa? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? The list goes on and on.

Those who would argue that betraying their most fundamental principles was the only way to open China to the rest of the world -- did they try any other way? Because it was never an either-or proposition.

Now the world is faced with a China who boasts of its economic success to poorer countries and touts repressive government as the way to success. So what can the bastions of democracy say in answer? After they spent decades aiding and abetting China's insistence on anti-democratic government?

One cannot survey the accomplishment of the democratic nations without feeling the horror voiced by the doctor at the end of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Madness. Absolute madness.

A reader sent me a link to an essay that analyzes China's chance for democracy by taking an extensive look at China's changing demographics. The essayist, who goes by the pen name of Spengler and writes for the Asia Times, starts with the observation:

Whenever the government of the People's Republic of China agrees with the US State Department about China's internal affairs, it is a good bet that either both are wrong or that the matter is irrelevant.

Spengler goes on to explain why he thinks State shouldn't put stock in Beijing's promise of direct elections at the township level within a few years:

Rural self-rule has no bearing at all upon the problem of Chinese governance. If Chinese villagers have the opportunity to elect their own leaders, the main issue about which they will quarrel will be who is allowed to leave first.

Instead, China must learn to rule cities that are mushrooming into the largest urban concentrations the world has ever known, populated by poor migrants speaking various dialects.

By far the largest popular migration in history is in flow tide between the Chinese countryside and coastal cities. In the mere span of five years between 1996 and 2000, China's urban-rural population ratio rose to 36%-64% from 29%-71%, and the UN Population Division projects that by 2050, the ratio will shift to 67%-33% urban. Chinese cities, the UN forecasts, will contain 800 million people by mid-century. By 2015, the population of cities will reach 220 million, compared to the 1995 level of 134 million.

Well over half a billion souls will migrate from farm to city over the space of half a century. All of them will be quite poor. China claims 80% literacy, but as countryside reads less than the city, it is a fair guess that a third of the migrants will be illiterate, and many of them, again perhaps a third, will not be able to understand a political speech in Mandarin, the largest dialect.

No historical precedent exists for a population transfer on this scale, and to conduct it peacefully would be a virtuoso act of statecraft. To require China to adopt a Western parliamentary regime in the process is utopian. [...] (1)

Spengler closes with a wonderful summary of why the US has the world's best government and why Samuel Huntington's Confucian-babble is babble.

He also points out that American faith in constitutional ideals has always been shored by a cushion of capital. From there he advises that America should offer China "practical suggestions, such as how to develop internal capital markets, rather than grandiose and self-serving advice."

Granted, the US should tone down the grandiose rhetoric. But the problem with Spengler's advice is that it ignores screamingly obvious facts. China's rulers are not bumpkins. They are people loath to share power. They've spent more than a half century coming up with every excuse in the book for not sharing.

So I venture it is naive for Washington to assume that offering Beijing the same good economic advice they've gotten for years from the IMF and bankers in Taipei, Hong Kong, London and Singapore is the best help the US can give China.

The US Department of State can't force democracy on the Chinese but they can stop fawning over Beijing's endless prevarication. How to do this? By loudly and repeatedly reminding Beijing that China's economic progress was achieved on the back of democratic governments.

That, I submit, is the most practical course for American diplomacy with regard to China. It's practical because it treats China's leaders for what they are: adults fully possessed of their faculties. By continuing to nod in agreement with Beijing's excuses the US foreign office treats the Chinese as if they're idiots. Don't think Beijing is unaware that they're being patronized.

As to the mountain of problems that a half billion rural Chinese will face in coming to the big city, and the challenge this poses for establishing democracy in China: how does Spengler think America was built up? Was it done by a bunch a big-city PhDs speaking the King's English? No. It was built from waves of illiterate village hicks babbling every dialect you can think of, including Chinese ones.

Spengler's pessimism ignores the native intelligence of all peoples everywhere, including villagers. Many millions of immigrants to this country quickly learned the drill: you learn to speaka da English a little, you learn to read a little, and you get the general idea of democracy -- enough to vote.

Landing a man on the moon was hard; getting the basic drill of living in a democratic country is never hard. But first the drill has to be in place.

(1) China must wait for democracy.

Pundita discovered by following a link in Spengler's China essay (see previous post) that his demographics-based analysis of Iran is the most informative to come down the pike recently about Tehran's plans. Here I am afraid the news is worse than Spengler's statistics delivered about China's problems; it is alarming.

As a regular listener to the John Batchelor show, Pundita has had it drummed into her that Iran's rulers want to take a page from Hitler's Mein Kampf. But the military based analysis supporting this view has never caused Pundita lost sleep. After all, the gang in Tehran is not the first in modern times with dreams of conquering a large swath. Indeed, that was Saddam Hussein's dream.

However, the statistics that Spengler marshals show why Iran's rulers are integrating their totalitarian government with plans for conquest. It's either that or face a total collapse of their power. The demographics combined with the looming decline in their oil revenue dictate the stark reality for Iran's rulers:

By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran -- converging on America's dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran's per capita GDP of $7,000 -- especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits.

The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so. Below, I will review the relevant numbers. [...]

Muslim birth rates are collapsing as literacy rises, that is, as the modern world intrudes upon traditional society. Islamic traditional society is so fragile that it crumbles as soon as women learn to read.

But the Islamists will not wait for traditional society to unravel [...] In programs made public on August 15, [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad revealed a response worthy of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin to the inevitable unraveling of Iran's traditional society. He proposes to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians. That is a preemptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran, in keeping with a totalitarian program for all aspects of Iranian society. [...]

Reengineering the shape of Iran's population, the central plank of the new government's domestic program, should be understood as the flip side of Iran's nuclear coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an aggressive foreign policy both constitute a response to the coming crisis.

Iran claims that it must develop nuclear power to replace diminishing oil exports. It seems clear that Iranian exports will fall sharply, perhaps to zero by 2020, according to Iranian estimates. But Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home. [...] (1)

Call me a cockeyed optimist but Pundita finds herself in disagreement with how Spengler applies his analysis to Tehran's designs on Iraq's Shia population.

After emerging from centuries of subjugation to the Sunni majority in the Middle East, Iraq's Shiites would be fools to subjugate themselves to a clique in Iran and they know this. Or rather, they learned this the hard way. The silver lining to US stumbles in post-Saddam Iraq is that Iraq's Shiites experienced the consequences of Tehran's support of the so-called Sunni insurgency, which has claimed so many Iraqi Shia lives.

Yet Spengler's analysis does not fall short in conveying the threat Iran poses. Looking past the rap about a grand coalition of Muslims, Iran's military has practical reasons to view conquest as the only viable means to retain power. Spengler observes:

Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness [in an earlier essay] that seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis, and determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no idea what sort of opponent it confronts.

Support for the latter observation has come over the years from John Batchelor. Every once in a while, in the manner of Diogenes, John inquires of learned guests, "Does Washington have a plan yet for dealing with Iran?"

After hemming and hawing the guest always replies, "No."

Demographics and Iran's imperial design (By Spengler for the Asia Times, September 13.)

"Dear Pundita:
[Re yesterday's post] You wrote, "So, what type of disease presents with a symptom of a "dissolving" body along with symptoms that include vomiting, stomachache (and after death) a "large area hemorrhage inside the body?" (Para. 5) A blood-borne disease so highly infectious and lethal that within short order it killed two doctors who were exposed to the patient's blood? (Para. 7)"

Well, necrotizing fasciitis comes to mind:

http://www.nnff.org/nnff_factsheet.htm

It has the symptoms described, can be blood-borne or airborne, and can be very fast and lethal.

Could it be transmitted to the doctors? I have no idea about what procedures and sterile conditions are in Chinese hospitals but I can guess.
Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye"

Dear Dave:
That's interesting, particularly with regard to some accounts of "very fast" death in Sichuan in relation to the mystery "pig disease" and which (if my memory serves) mentioned a "melted" or dissolved body in some cases.

However, with regard to the accounts relating to the outbreak in Shenzhen, Guangdong I think we can rule out necrotizing fasciitis (NF). I might have made this clearer if I had qualified the statement you quote by adding, "and which fits with the timeline of symptom onset and patient death mentioned in the translation of the March 25 Epoch Times article."

If untreated NF certainly kills fast; it kills too fast to make it a likely candidate for the illness described in the translation.

However, for the benefit of the readers I'll examine the NF angle as it might apply to the victims discussed in the translation. First let's review two timelines of the symptoms for necrotizing fasciitis (early and advanced stage) from the link you sent (emphasis throughout mine):

EARLY SYMPTOMS (usually within 24 hours):
> [...] The pain is usually disproportionate to the injury and may start as something akin to a muscle pull, but becomes more and more painful.

> Flu like symptoms begin to occur, such as diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.

> Intense thirst occurs as the body becomes dehydrated.

> The biggest symptom is all of these symptoms combined. In general you will probably feel worse than you've ever felt and not understand why.

CRITICAL SYMPTOMS (usually within 4-5 days):
> Blood pressure will drop severely.

> The body begins to go into toxic shock from the toxins the bacteria are giving off.

> Unconsciousness will occur as the body becomes too weak to fight off this infection.

Now to the account of the "Ebola-like" outbreak in Shenzhen:

"2. According to this insider, in early January 2005, when conducting a suppressing smuggling campaign in Daya Bay, custom officials of Shenzhen City encountered a ship with unknown nationality.

3. The officials boarded the ship to investigate and the black sailors on the ship physically assaulted the Chinese officials, injuring two of them. One of the injured officials, Mr. Yang, died mysteriously in late February."

So, exposure is in early January and death occurs in late February. Yet if not properly treated, necrotizing fasciitis presents with critical symptoms (followed by death) within 4-5 days after infection! So Mr. Yang would have needed to be a superman to have lasted as long as he did, if he had contracted NF.

To return to the account:

"4. The other injured official, Mr. Jiang, is also missing after being forcibly taken away from Tianmian Garden located in the center of Shenzhen City.

5. It was revealed that the reason for their quarantine was that Mr. Yang's inamorata [*] vomited and had stomachache among with other symptoms in her residence in Buji district in early February. Two weeks after she was sent to a hospital in Buji district for treatment, she died mysteriously inside the hospital. Upon death, she had large area hemorrhage inside her body."

Here we find another superman -- superwoman, in this case. Mr. Yang's mistress managed to survive at least a week longer than a diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis would warrant.

Now we turn to the sailors who presumably started it all. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we don't know how long the "black" sailors were on the smuggling ship in Daya Bay before it was boarded by the unfortunate Messrs. Yang and Jiang.

But because there is no mention of the Ebola-like outbreak occurring in Shenzhen prior to the custom officials' encounter with the sailors on board the mystery ship, we can tentatively assume that if the illness they carried was NF, they must have contracted it a very few hours prior to the Chinese custom officials boarding their ship.

(If they'd had NF longer than a few hours, we must also credit the sailors with superhuman powers, which is what it would take to put up a vigorous fist fight while experiencing "diarrhea, nausea, fever, confusion, dizziness, weakness, and general malaise.")

So if we want to consider NF, there is a tiny window of opportunity before the story of the black sailors collapses into a Fish Tale. And there is no window of opportunity for the account of how Mr. Yang and his fancy woman met their death. If they were not properly treated for NF (and clearly they were not) they couldn't have lasted more than week.

On the other hand if they were infected with a strain of Ebola, the story also becomes hard to swallow when we consider that the doctor's eyewitness account of a "melted body" does not square with the symptoms of Ebola.

Also, we must consider that a doctor with "many years' experience," as he is described in the account, would recognize a gangrenous condition, which is what NF produces if untreated.

"Gangrene is necrosis and subsequent decay of body tissues caused by infection or thrombosis or lack of blood flow. It is usually the result of critically insufficient blood supply sometimes caused by injury and subsequent contamination with bacteria. This condition is most common in the extremities." From Wikipedia article on gangrene.)

NF presents with a gangrenous condition in the advanced or middle stage of infection (from the link you sent):

ADVANCED SYMPTOMS (usually within 3-4 days):
> The limb, or area of body experiencing pain begins to swell, and may show a purplish rash.

> The limb may begin to have large, dark marks, that will become blisters filled with blackish fluid.

> The wound may actually begin to appear necrotic with a bluish, white, or dark, mottled, flaky appearance.

Again, any doctor with long experience in a big city hospital would be familiar with gangrene. Unless we want to consider the theory that reader "Liz" put forward in August, which is that doctors in communist countries can have such specialized training that they can fail to recognize even the most elementary medical condition outside the specialization!

However, I think Liz was referring to communism's Cold War era. In any case, Shenzhen is a 'special business/free trade' zone, which means the city has many non-Chinese (Western, Singaporean, etc.) businesspeople in residence.

That doesn't mean state-of-the-art hospitals exist in Shenzhen but it's likely that hospitals in the city have a staff that could at least recognize a gangrenous condition, and that they'd treated instances of such. Yet the doctor of "many years' experience" who provided the account said that he'd never seen anything like the illness he treated.

If we rule out Ebola virus and flesh-eating bacteria, what are we left with? Was there any kind of disease outbreak in Shenzhen city in January 2005? I dunno, Dave. One thing I know with certainty: Pundita is getting tired of doing the kind of homework that US intelligence agencies find beneath them.

They had us off and running with the reports about an Ebola disease outbreak in Sichuan. Before sounding the alarm, the intel agencies needed to consider that without a shred of evidence in hand, they should have immdiately switched to a wide-angle lens when examining the situation.

For example, they needed to look at China's pork industry and look into the possibility of an industrial accident. Or even deliberate poisoning by big pork producers trying to put the Mom & Pop pig breeders in Sichuan out of business.

All that is baseline considerations when analyzing reports of a lethal, mysterious, highly infectious disease -- and reports of mass deaths in a province in China (Sichuan) that was rendered off-limits to foreign reporters, the CDC and WHO.

There doesn't seem to have been much progress since 9/11 with our intelligence analysis capabilities. Doesn't our government understand that they can't leave it up to bloggers and private intel companies such as Statfor to do the background digging for them?

In this era the US needs intelligence analysts who are aces at integrating a broad spectrum of data. The technology for collecting and massaging such data is, of course, already here. What seems to be lacking is the generalist viewpoint, which is needed for analyzing broad-spectrum data.

Without a strong representation of the generalist viewpoint, intel agencies are doing threat assessment in purely military terms, which cuts out many key factors. The upshot is US defense/foreign policy based on a skewed viewpoint.

With that off my chest, we'll buckle down to a little homework. It's time to take a closer look at the people who reportedly caught the disease mentioned in the March 25 Epoch Times article.

And ask whether there might have been anything else going on in Shenzhen city in the period from early January to March 25 -- anything other than a smuggling ship found in Daya Bay and a reported outbreak of Ebola virus infection.

So here we return to Pundita's "You're telling me this because?" rule of thumb for Americans (to include intelligence analysts) trying to make sense out of foreign policy/defense news -- in particular news relating to China.

Whatever the nature of the illness that reportedly broke out in Shenzhen city, there was also an outbreak of the Casablanca Factor. ("Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.")

I note that Yang and Jiang (reportedly stricken with an Ebola-like illness after a scuffle with "black" sailors in Daya Bay) were customs officials.

Not to speak ill of the dead and/or missing, but we can assume they were particularly corrupt officials. (From close reading of Epoch Times you'll note that keeping "fancy women" seems to be code in China for CCP officials widely known to be especially corrupt.)

So it might be worthwhile to take a look at Daya Bay and the Shenzhen free trade/'special' business zone, and recall the struggle between China's central authority and local authorities regarding who controls customs.

What is Daya Bay?:

Huizhou Daya Bay Economic and Technological Development Zone was approved as state-level development zone in May 1993. The zone has a developed area of 6.98 square kilometers.

Geographical Location
Huizhou Daya Bay Economic & Technological Development Area is situated in the southern part of Huizhou, Guangdong, facing the South Sea, neighboring Shantou on its east and connected to Shenzhen on its west. It is 60 kilometers away from Hong Kong by land, 47 nautical miles away from Zhonghuan wharf of Hong Kong.

It will be only 36 kilometers away from the downtown of Shenzhen after the class 1 highway is finished along the coastline between Macau and Shenzhen. The Zone is situated within the economic belt along the line of Beijing-Kowloon Railway and the center of the developed Pearl River Delta economic circle. [...]

The March 25 Epoch Times article on an outbreak of Ebola virus in Shenzhen appeared just five days after a trade meeting ended in Shenzhen.

The free trade zones have cut hugely into profits for customs officials who spent generations slapping extra duties on imports as a means to pad their meager salary.

And as with Sichuan's stick-in-the-mud pig farmers, if you'll pardon the expression, local time-honored ways of doing business in China have run smack-dab into the central government's rush to modernize China's business and trade practices.

Such a rush anywhere can be very hard on the people long settled in the old ways. In China, however, standing in the way of progress can be very dangerous to your life. Reference bao jia. When the central authority in China orders a local boss to remove obstructionists, they mean -- remove by any means whatsoever.

In other words, it might not be coincidental that out of all the towns in China and all Chinese in China, it happened to be two Daya Bay customs officials who caught a mysterious Ebola-like aliment and died or were never heard from again along with their families and fancy women.

In the final wash, the Epoch Times article threw more light on the situation with China's customs officials than a mystery disease. Messrs. Yang and Jiang were conveniently out of the way by the time an important American trade delegation showed up in Shenzhen city. Pundita doesn't need to consult her crystal ball to know that the untimely disappearance of customs officials, their families and fancy women was not lost on the rest of China's customs officials.

How important was the visiting delegation? It received press coverage from the China Daily, Bloomberg Asia, the Shenzhen Daily, and the Yangcheng Evening News.

FTASA and GKDA TRIP REPORT
Guangdong Province, China
March 12-20, 2005
Free Trade Alliance San Antonio (FTASA)
Greater Kelly Development Authority (GKDA)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Representatives of the GKDA (Bruce Miller, CEO and Jorge Canavati, Director of Marketing) and FTASA (Blake Hastings, Executive Director) traveled to the region Guangdong Province the week of March 12-20, 2005. The visit was conducted in coordination with the annual Asia Pacific American Chambers of Commerce held in Guangzhou, Guangdong. In addition, Tom Loeffler and Jose Martinez of the San Antonio-based Loeffler Group also participated in the conference.

During the visit, the San Antonio team met with officials from trade promotion and ecnomic development entities, provincial and local governments, and manufacturing and logistics companies. Special thanks go to the First Washington Asia (Holdings) ... in Guangzhou and their two principals Mr. Harley Seyedin and Mrs. Sun Hui for their tremendous support and help in arranging a very productive agenda for the FTASA and GKDA. In addition, thanks also go to the American Chamber of Commerce in Guangdong for their support and conference arrangements.

Trip Goals
There were four primary objectives of the trip:
1) Research – to provide the GKDA and the FTASA with a clearer
understanding of the trade and investment potential for KellyUSA and San
Antonio within the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of Guangdong Province;

2) San Antonio and KellyUSA Awareness - to begin creating an awareness of San Antonio and KellyUSA as competitive alternatives for Chinese export manufacturers seeking to establish new sales and distribution channels/ locations in the United States;

3) Strategic Relationships - to develop collaborative relationships with trade promotion entities in the Guangdong region which can facilitate further trade
and investment development efforts of the GKDA and FTASA;

4) Representation Feasibility [...]

Before plowing through the rest of the above report, you might want to glance through this history of Free Trade Zones in China from a 2001 China Daily article. This will help us understand the problems faced by customs officials just trying to make extra dough and pay the bills for their fancy women:

"China's entry into the World Trade Organization will not mean the end of its 15 free trade zones but a chance for their improvement and perfection, according to an official with the administration of Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone.

Feng Zhijiang, deputy director of the administrative committee of the free trade zone, said, "Free trade zone is still a popular thing in the world, and it will play a more important role in China as the country completely opens up to the outside world."

About 50 kilometers from the city of Tianjin and 170 kilometers from Beijing, the seven-square-kilometer Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone has developed from a bleak sea shore to a lucrative home to about 4,000 domestic and overseas enterprises in 10 years.

By the end of 2000, the trade zone had attracted about US$5 billion investments, ranking after only Shanghai Waigaoqiao in the country. About 80 percent of the investments were foreign investments.

After opening Shenzhen and other three coastal cities in South China as special economic regions and then dozens of economic and technological development zones in the 1980s, the country introduced free trade zones in the early 1990s in 15 coast cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin.

These specially carved out cities and zones served as the country's centers to embrace foreign investments and international way of economic and trade practice.

Often located around major seaports, free trade zones are said to be "inside the territory but outside customs," -- companies registered here are exempt from complex customs regulation and tariffs and value-added taxes; they also enjoy a series of preferential treatment as in other special economic areas.

Since the local governments spent about 40 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) to build the free trade zones in areas totaling 22 kilometers, a large number of domestic and overseas companies have settled down there.

By now, the contractual investments have amounted to more than US$16 billion. But people were worrying that when China enters WTO and gradually lowers the high tariffs to a moderate level, the free trade zone's duty-free policies may lose their edge.

"The zones are facing challenges when the country gradually lifts quotas of various imported goods and brings the tariff to a relatively low level," said Zhong Weilin, deputy director of the administrative committee of Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

He was attending a seminar last month with representatives from other 14 free trade zones, who gathered in Shenzhen to discuss the future of the free trade zones after China's admission into WTO. The companies might reconsider where their investment should go when preferential policies on duties or taxies are no longer too much different, Zhang said.

But Feng Zhijiang, who was also present at the Shenzhen seminar last month, said the tariffs are not the major element for free trade zones to attract foreign investments. The meaning of free trade zones' existence lies in their efficiency in processing goods, the speed to finish the customs procedures, the capability of cargo flow distributions, Feng said.

The free trade zones, which often have convenient geographic advantages and long been good at cargo processing and distribution, will develop themselves into distribution and trade centers for imports and exports.

He said it was true that the decade-old free trade zones in China still had much to do as the country lacks experience and a set of laws were still not in place. In the developed countries the free trade zones are directly administrated by the national governments, and all activities are governed by law.

While in China, the zones are watched by local governments, and what can be referred to are only some policies and regulations. It is urgent for the central government to draft a law regarding free trade zones so as to adjust the domestic trade zones onto the international track when the country joins WTO, Feng said."

The background reports in this post just scratch the surface. How about if the DIA and the CIA and Department of State's intelligence branch start earning their paychecks by doing a little more digging?

What worries me is that many Americans (including those in the news media) still talk about 9/11 as happening "out of the blue." Yet the only thing al Qaeda didn't do to warn of an impending attack was take out an advertisement in The New York Times.

I recall a weatherman observing that there is no such thing as a lightning bolt "out of the blue." If lighting appears, there is a cloud -- maybe high up, but lightning doesn't fall from a clear blue sky.

I do not know how the US can formulate intelligent defense/foreign policy for this era, if we continue to wear blinders while analyzing threats to US security, which includes the present instability in China.

China's central goverment is pushing their people too hard, too fast, in the effort to accommodate foreign business and the WTO. This has resulted in one disaster after another, which has led to widescale riots. Washington needs to take all this into account.

None of the above means that there wasn't a mysterious lethal disease outbreak in Shenzhen followed by an equally mysterious outbreak in Sichuan province. Indeed, none of it means Patricia Doyle's speculation is wrong; i.e., that there wasn't a biowar experiment in China that somehow jumped the lab. It means that the Pentagon, DOS and CIA need to get their act together. Else Americans will be sitting ducks for another bolt "out of the blue."