Month: May 2004

A friend of mine Fred Schoeneman wrote a good post at his blog. Pretty funny!

“For those of you who haven’t been enlisted swine, officers aren’t always like Clancy writes them. They aren’t wooden, super-patriotic, whipsmart, selfless, barrel-chested or even particularly brave. The guys from West Point were smart but arrogant; and the guys from ROTC were dumb and arrogant, even though they were supposed to be more laid back. Most of them were just cheese, nothing like Jack Ryan.

Jack Ryan is the kind of character that a former insurance salesman who has never been in the military would have created. And he was. Jack Ryan is total pornography. If you don’t believe me, go check out Rainbow Coalition Six. I did. It was a total blowjob of a book, about a politically correct commando team; it was so bad I couldn’t finish the first chapter. I had to put it down and pick up one of Ann Rice’s vampire novels. Yeah, Lestat is so sexy. Goth Porn gets my juices flowing.”

More stories like this one are inevitable as the recording industry makes war on its customers, in a doomed attempt to revive the industry’s dying business model.

(Link: Drudge)

Has it occurred to anyone else that Al Queda may have an election strategy for the USA? Maybe a string of mass-casualty suicide bombings, à la Madrid, six weeks or so before the presidential election?

What would be the likely political impact on the electorate? Rally behind Bush & Co.? I don’t think so, really. Here’s what I think might happen:

1. Public shock.

2. 24/7 media replays of the carnage for weeks on end. There’s a symbiotic relationship between terrorists and the media; they depend on each other to a degree. In this case, the NYT, WaPo, LAT, CNN, etc, would view it as a political godsend, in addition to its being a ‘good’ news story. Sad – even pathetic – to say, but true. Traitors.

3. Interviews with victims’ families, friends, former school teachers, co-workers, witnesses, clergy, etc. on network TV.

4. Questions will be raised about continued failures at the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security.

5. Questions will be raised about the ‘relationship’ between a rise in US terrorism and the war in Iraq.

6. John Kerry will ask, “Are you safer today than you were four years ago?”

7. France, Germany, et al will say in somber tones – crocodile tears streaming down their faces into their cabernet sauvignons and lagers – “See! We told you so!”

8. Our Middle-Eastern allies will tell us it’s our own fault. Graphic posters of the event will go on sale within days throughout the PA territory and in bazaars in Pakistan. President (for life) Mubarak of Egypt will recite platitudes about US “failures” to resolve the Israeli/Pali conflict and our imperialist imposition of foreign ideas on the traditional Arab societies. He will explain this to us as our ‘friend’. Nothing like being lectured on political morality by the dictator of a failed state. He will do it for our own good, you see.

9. Al Queda will issue a truce offer to the US: Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and the martyrs will no longer strike at the US.

10. Ted Kennedy will demand we accept.

It could be enough to throw the election. Especially if there’s a simultaneous uptick in suicide bombings in Iraq. We know how AQ likes simultaneity. A coordinated campaign like that might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. From AQ’s point of view, it’s the smart move. A strategic move. Personally, I’ll be watching for it. And waiting for it.

He’s being touted as a VP for Kerry. (See Kaus, for example.) Zinni’s out promoting his book, and criticizing Bush. (“They’ve screwed up.”) “In the lead-up to the Iraq War and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption.” (Here.) (LGF has hard words about Zinni.)

I think he’ll get the veep.

Oh yeah. I told you so.

Mike at The Feces Flinging Monkey notes that an American lawyer was imprisoned for 2 weeks because his fingerprints were mistakenly matched to a latent print found on an item used by terrorists.

That’s what I used to do when I worked for the police. Fingerprints, ID, stuff like that. I figure you guys would like to hear an opinion from someone with some practical experience.

So far as prints are concerned, they are 100% reliable when it comes to an ID. There are some people who have a problem with this, but that’s the way it is.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not false matches, though. The problem lies in the quality of the prints themselves, either the ones taken from the person you want to ID or from items and surfaces found at a crime scene.

One of the biggest problems I had was with crack addicts. They’d use glass pipes to smoke the drug, the smaller the better so the pipe would be missed in a search. They’d heat up to some really impressive temperatures, and the addict would be so high after the first puff that they wouldn’t be able to feel their fingers cooking.

This meant that most of the print would be burned off by the time I got them. Even so, there would almost always be enough detail to make a positive match. If there wasn’t we would just wait, since fingerprints grow back unless the skin is very horribly scarred. And if it was too scarred to read the print, well, even scars on fingertips have enough fine detail to make a positive match.

The other problem lies with latent prints. These are prints found out in the wild, so to speak. There’s no telling who left the prints, or usually when they were left, so the fingerprint examiner focuses on objects that had to be used to facilitate a crime. Find a print on a weapon or object used in a crime and that would go a long way to proving guilt.

But the world is imperfect, and most people are in a hurry when they’re committing a crime. So the vast majority of latent prints are smeared or obscured in some way. This can also be due to a bit of fumbling while lifting the print from the surface where it’s found as well as environmental factors.

But there’s standards to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The print has to have a certain amount of detail, a finite number of distinct features visible, before it can be used as evidence.

It looks to me like the latent print itself didn’t have this level of detail. So the latent print examiner at the FBI put it through their AFIS computer to see what the machine could do with it. When it came up with a match they picked the one that looked most promising and sent the data along.

This might not be as sinister as it seems. I don’t have access to the evidence files, so it could very well be that they simply told the Spanish intel guys that it looked like this lawyer was involved, and someone should explore that avenue of investigation. Then it would be over zealous Spanish cops who decided to pull the suspect in.

But this doesn’t excuse the FBI in any way. Like I said, there’s standards that they’re supposed to follow, and it’s obvious that they dropped the ball. If they didn’t have enough detail to make a positive match they should have simply said that they couldn’t do anything with the evidence and let it go at that.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not the system of using fingerprints as an ID tool that’s faulty here. Instead it’s human error that screwed everything up. Cops are people too, they make mistakes, and they really want to catch the bad guys. The problem is when they don’t follow the rules and try to make shortcuts.