RTFA: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4496829n

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Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin share their thoughts on the best and worst parts of current Vice President Dick Cheney’s career. Katie Couric reports.

Good point in the CBS comment thread: just because Biden has tons of experience with interviews doesn’t mean he’s the better candidate. Biden is a known critic of Cheney, so is this answer surprising? …but once again, I think this clip speaks to the preparedness of the two VP candidates.

It’s possible to be critical of Cheney’s actions without getting overly partisan.

For example, consider Cheney’s closed-door Energy Task Force which happens to have preceded the Enron scandal, California’s blackouts, inflation of energy costs unseen since the 1970s, and the inherent conflict of interest involved in being the former CEO of Halliburton, an energy services company. By the way: Halliburton has moved its headquarters from Texas to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, with the partial justification being that it will reduce costs by lowering their taxes.

As another example, consider the infamous Cheney decision to shoot down United Flight 93, which was the 9/11 hijacking airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania. According to the official 9/11 Report, Cheney deliberated over this decision in “the time it takes a batter to decide to swing.” Those are literally the words. While I do not disagree with the decision, I would like to believe that a world leader would be more considerate in a situation like that.

There are Cheney’s repeated attempts to deceive the US people into believing that Iraq was somehow involved with 9/11, even though there was no evidence to support this … even though Cheney’s office has now been convicted of criminal activity in attempting to fabricate the evidence and cover it up. It was Cheney’s office (if not Cheney himself) who blew Plame’s CIA cover, in retaliation for questioning the Iraq-9/11 link. …and Palin was caught red-handed repeating the Cheney rhetoric.

Finally, there is the duck hunting incident, and the attempt to cover it up during the days immediately following. It’s embarrassing, in the first place, but the attempt to keep the story from the media is par for the course, and damning.

…but that is seriously the worst Palin is willing to be critical of? This is scandalously wrong! As Biden points out, detention and torture is wrong, and so is Unitary Executive Theory. Palin seems to have no problems with any of this, and that in and of itself is troubling.

cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/

This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal
use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Four of the articles also appeared in the Intelligence Community journal Studies in Intelligence during that time frame. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis.

The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.

RTFA: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and…

Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion.

She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points.

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC.

Edmonds is the subject of a number of state secret gags preventing her from talking further about the investigation she witnessed.

…the “blowback” from outsourcing your intelligence to third-party translators. The number of buzz-words involved in the span of a few paragraphs is absolutely shocking.

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/29/bush-fundrais…

Remember the strange circumstances surrounding the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan last month? There’s more.

According to Mad Cow Morning News, the plane was once owned by ultra-rich Bush supporter Stephen Adams. (In July, the Federal Election Commission filed suit against Adams on charges that he “failed to report and include proper disclaimers on $1,000,000 in billboard ads during the 2004 Presidential race.”)

Not only that, but Mad Cow alleges that Adam’s business partner owned the other American drug plane that was found in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine in 2006.

Okay – this is two stories in a row involving CIA drug planes.

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/31/chicago-pubic…

In the comments to the weird story about the crashed drug plane with ties to the CIA, Mongip pointed to a “much more detailed, objective and intriguing investigative report on this plane,”
from Chicago Public Radio.

This story is crazy, and these airplanes are insane.