April 16: Obama releases the torture memos

April 17: Greg Craig moves to release Uighurs in US

April 20: Dick Cheney says mean things about Obama

Late April: A drop in Obama’s ratings on national security

April 23: Administration says it will release torture photos

April 24: Someone (!) leaks Craig’s plan on Uighurs to Congress

May 8: Obama flip-flops on torture photos

Mid-May: Obama flip-flops on military commissions and release of Uighurs

May 21: Obama’s Archive speech marks completion of national security flip-flop

In other words, after having made the right decision on the torture memos, the Obama Administration let Cheney beat them up over doing so. They did not respond publicly. Rather, they simply caved.

Precisely what Cheney wanted them to do.

I guess Dick Cheney is right–Obama can’t stand up to terrorists. Terrorists like Dick Cheney.

It seems that the Brett Favre-Green Bay Packers saga is such a worldwide phenomenon that it’s being used by detainees in American military camps.

According to a military official, detainees at a Wisconsin National Guard camp in Iraq are using Brett Favre as a manner of getting at the guard troops there.

“They know Favre by name,” said First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen, who is from New Richmond, Wis.

“One of the big words they know now is shenanigan. They’ll constantly talk about ‘Favre shenanigans,’ ‘He’s so good for the Vikings,’ and ‘The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.’ ”

According to Boehnen, it started when troops there started decorating their camp in Packers colors.

Heh. I wonder how you say Ted Thompson is a big fat arrogant idiot in Arabic. And I wonder how the Cheeseheads respond; it’s not like there is much they can say back to the creative and pesky detainees in light of the ass whuppin Favre and the Vikes have laid on them twice. Even on the hallowed Frozen Tundra of Lambeau. Ouch.

In other tangential football news, Obama has been chucking the pigskin on the White House lawn with Drew Fookin Brees (thus today’s musical selection “They Call Me The Breeze”). From USA Today:

President Obama is exercising executive privilege to get youngsters off their butts, and to urge all Americans to volunteer for community service.
In a TV spot set to run on Thanksgiving Day, viewers will see New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees zinging a pass to an unseen player. As we look closer, we realize the receiver is actually President Obama. The playing field is the White House lawn. The defender is Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu.

The 90-second public service announcement is a joint effort between the NFL’s Play 60 campaign to fight childhood obesity and the president’s United We Serve public-service effort.

Pretty cool, and a worthy cause too. Football on the lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania; somewhere JFK, RFK and Teddy are smiling.

National Favre League: Lot of crappy games this week. What happened to all that “parity” in the league for a couple of years? A bunch of good teams and a bunch of crappy teams makes for a lot of crappy games. Falcons at Giants is interesting. Both teams have been a tad spotty lately (really spotty for the Gents). Both teams are 5-4 and desperately need a win to stay viable for the playoffs. I rate it a pick em. Peyton and the Colts at the Ravens could be good too. Ray Lewis must be hopping mad and motivated as hell right about now from the inconsistent play of the team so far, but the Colts look to be too much I think. Jets at Pats is getting a lot of press, but it is hard to see Belichick losing another game after last weeks fourth down brain fart. Bolts at Donkos could be good too. Bolts are on their late season run early this year; the Donkos are crashing back to reality and Kyle Orton is hurt and very questionable. His backup, Chris Simms, seems like a nice kid, but he sucks. So, the Bolts easy right? Maybe. The game is at Mile High, and that is a big equalizer, so who knows. The Monday night game of Tennessee at Houston sounds mediocre, but really should be pretty good. Vince Young and the Titans are both rejuvenated and starting to play Jeff Fisher ball like they are capable of. Houston is quietly fairly solid. This game is a sleeper.

Student Athaletes: Well here are words I never thought I would utter: The big game of the week is in The Old Pueblo, Tucson, with Mike Stoops and the Arizona Wildcats hosting the Quackers from Oregon. Winner controls their own destiny for the Rose Bowl; but both still have tough games left – USC and ASU for Arizona and Oregon State (the “Civil War) for the Ducks. Much as I hate to say it, Mike Stoops sucks, the Cats have a history of blowing big games and I’ll take Oregon here. Cal is at Stanford for “The Big Game”. That wacky Stanford Band will do something goofy and the Stanford Tree will continue to roll. Penn State better watch out for an upset when they visit Sparta in East Lansing. In other also ran snoozers, the team with an offense that matches the JC Penny backwoods sweater vest wardrobe of its head coach, apparently is visiting the pushovers in the home of Bo Merlot. The Wolverweenies make Charlie Weiss and the Domers look competent, and that is saying something. The Buckeyes are just boring, but will likely roll. I am just thankful that all the Big Ten teams have at least two losses so we do not have to suffer through another embarrassment of one of their teams possibly appearing in the BCS Championship and getting their asses waxed. Again.

So that is it for this week. Talk some smack jack!

This will be another working thread on the EFF FOIA Documents–I’ll be focusing on the Office of Legal Counsel documents. Here was the first working thread (National Security Division documents) and the second working thread (Office of Information Policy documents).

The two sets of documents are:

• Draft legislation to amend FISA
• Correspondence about amending FISA

And here’s the Vaughn Indices DOJ earlier submitted on these documents to help you figure out what they said they had.

For more on what’s in the EFF docs, MadDog and Jim White have a bunch of comments on the documents in this thread.

FISC Orders from 2007, 2006, and 2004

Shortly after the Bush Administration worked out a way to do its surveillance program through FISC, House Intelligence Committee staffer started working with Steven Bradbury to get permission for the committee to see the “recent FISA order.” During the negotiations for that, Bash noted that the committee should have been able to see the other FISA orders.

Ben Powell had indicated to me that were supposed to have been granted access to the previous orders/applications (’04 and ‘06).

This tells us the program was already working with some FISC approval–presumably solicited after the hospital confrontation in 2004 and after the exposure of the program in 2005.

Steven Bradbury’s NSA email?

I’m not sure, but the email address on page 55 appears to indicate that Steven Bradbury had his own NSA email address.

Bradbury’s Emergency

On March 13, 2007, Steven Bradbury sent a telecom (page 12) a description of the emergency that precipitated Bush’s illegal wiretapping (he doesn’t call it that of course). It starts like this:

On September 11, 2001, the al Qaeda terrorist network launched a set of coordinated attacks along the East Coast of the United States.

Presumably, that was language for a court filing–so we may be able to figure out which telecom it was by checking fillings. First place to check would be Verizon in the Maine Public Utilities case.

More on Foreign/Domestic Surveillance

I’ve been tracking some curious comments about foreign/domestic surveillance. Here’s what DOJ said (page 18) they were trying to do with FISA reform on April 13, 2007.

Adding an additional definition of an agent of a foreign power for non-U.S. persons whom the
Government believes possess significant intelligence information, but whose relationship to a foreign power is unclear.

This proposed change would apply only to non-United States persons in the United States, and collection of information from such an individual would be subject to the approval of the FISA Court.

The reference is significant given the Administration’s insistence on keeping the Lone Wolf in the PATRIOT Act.

SSCI cooperating on bypassing FISA Court

On July 27, 2007, Jack Livingston, a Republican staffer on SSCI claimed (page 28) people on both sides of the aisle wanted to get the FISA Court out of some of the surveillance.

As Louis stated, members on both sides of our committee have expressed a desire to get this out of the FISA court’s jurisdiction.

This was just days before Protect America Act passed.

Specter’s July 30 briefing

As you recall, Arlen Specter kept pushing Alberto Gonzales on his lies about Administration disagreement on “TSP.”

Which is what makes this sequence (page 81 to 82) so interesting.

I’ve attached the statement released by Sen. Spencer after today’s briefing. It conforms to the edits you made to his original.

Thank you for all the work that went into today’s briefing. I think Sen.  Specter was persuaded of the need to change FISA to address the concerns highlighted by the DNI.

I an happy to help coordinate a less detailed but still classified briefing for other Judiciary Committee Members at your earliest convenience.

You’d have no idea what they were talking about–but they were talking about the briefing that Specter demanded to reassure himself that Gonzales had not perjured himself.

STATEMENT OF SENATOR ARLEN SPECTER

I have received a briefing this after noon by the Director of National Intelligence and others from the Administration which included matters relating to whether Attorney General Gonzales testified accurately that there was no disagreement in the Administration about the Terrorist Surveillance Program as public described by the President. Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question from the Administration to Senator Leahy and me by noon tomorrow which will be made available to the news media. The Administration has committed to producing such a letter.

As we know, Gonzales was basically parsing carefully, speaking of the artifically named “TSP” as a way to bracket off things like the dragnet collection and data mining of communications. So it’s likely that the briefing was about those data mining activities. If so, though, note that the briefing convinced Specter to expand the authorities available under FISA.

Steny Hoyer’s failure

One of the most remarkable aspects (one I hope to do a post on) is to see the panic surrounding the August 2007 passage of the PAA.

Such as this tidbit (page 120), from August 4, 2007, the day this got pushed through, in response to whether the legislation was going to be voted on that day.

As far as we know it is, but we hear that Hoyer is so angry about not getting his way that he refuses to acknowledge right now that a bill is even going to be brought up. A lot of standing by to stand by …

Steny–and Pelosi–got absolutely skunked on this legislation. Its nice to see the Republicans laughing about badly they skunked Steny. FWIW, before the passage of the FAA in 2008, Steny forced both parties and both committees to meet in his office to try to craft a compromise. It’s interesting to know that that came after he had been skunked earlier in the process.

Wooing the Blue Dogs

Between February 28 and March 6, 2008, DOJ–including Attorney General Michael Mukasey) spent a lot of time individually wooing Blue Dogs for support on their legislation (pages 33 to XX). Those Blue Dogs include:

• Lincoln Davis (2/28)
• Earl Pomeroy (2/28)
• Allen Boyd (2/29)
• Chet Edwards (2/29)
• Artur Davis (2/29)
• Mike Ross (2/29)
• Jim Marshall (2/29)
• Chris Carney (3/5)
• Ike Skelton (3/5)
• Joe Donnelly (3/5)

This is obviously an attempt to get support from Blue Dogs for the Senate legislation.

It’s not surprising that the calls were made–but it is interesting to see who needed some hand-holding from Michael Mukasey for screwing their party.

In deciding to use federal court, the attorney general probably considered the record of the military commission system that was established in November 2001. This system secured three convictions in eight years. The only person who had a full commission trial, Osama bin Laden’s driver, received five additional months in prison, resulting in a sentence that was shorter than he probably would have received from a federal judge.

One reason commissions have not worked well is that changes in constitutional, international and military laws since they were last used, during World War II, have produced great uncertainty about the commissions’ validity. This uncertainty has led to many legal challenges that will continue indefinitely — hardly an ideal situation for the trial of the century.

By contrast, there is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again. [my emphasis]

It won’t do any good, though. Republicans want to try KSM in one of their fancy new military commissions even if it means they won’t get to kill him in the end.

It’s basically an email from Chris Donesa, a Republican HPSCI staffer, to a bunch of people at DNI, DOJ, and NSA who had been involved in the Protect America Act passage, followed by a letter Crazy Pete Hoekstra sent to NYT’s Bill Keller. He includes the message, “Happy Tuesday to all” as the only explanation.

The copy of Crazy Pete’s letter in the EFF documents is hard to read, but luckily Crazy Pete sent a copy to Human Events, too. Crazy Pete’s letter is, in turn, a response to an editorial the NYT ran after Congress caved on the PAA and a James Risen article reporting on what the legislation actually did.

Crazy Pete claims to refute the editorial and (more importantly) the Risen article.

Only, the EFF document dump makes it clear that Crazy Pete is, um, lying his ass off.

Every single one of Crazy Pete’s “refutations” completely avoid the charges made by the NYT, even while hiding the now provable fact that the NYT was absolutely correct. For example, this “refutation:”

• Misstatement and Exaggeration: “[T]he court’s only role will be to review and approve the procedures used by the government in the surveillance after it has been conducted.”

o Facts: This is a false and selective characterization of the plain provisions of the law.  Third parties who are asked to assist the intelligence community under the law may challenge the legality of any directive by filing a petition with the FISA Court.

Much of the discussion leading up to passage of PAA, we now know, involved preventing prior court review at all cost. And the FISCR ruling released earlier this year–on a PAA generated order–makes it clear that even when a service provider did challenge an order, all the court did was to “review and approve the procedures” the government used.

So, let me repeat. Crazy Pete Hoekstra was lying–apparently at the behest of the NSA and DNI. Just if all that wasn’t already clear.

But that’s why I find Crazy Pete’s objections to this Risen passage so interesting.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

I’ll treat the first three of Crazy Pete’s “refutations” one by one.

FISA is an extremely complex statute that is difficult enough to understand and apply even when it is not being deliberately distorted.  Unfortunately, instead of reading the law, the New York Times chose to make up new assertions wholly unsupported by the facts.  This did a disservice to our intelligence professionals who are attempting to keep America – especially prominent targets such as New York – safe.

This passage makes no concrete refutation of Risen’s claim at all. Rather, it instead insinuates that Risen was attacking intelligence professionals, but does not show his claim to be false.

The new law plainly and expressly provides that surveillance must be “directed at” (targeted to) a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.  Under well-established FISA practice and precedent, this only permits surveillance of foreign targets on foreign soil, not Americans on American soil.  The Intelligence Community must develop procedures to ensure this is the case, and those procedures must be reviewed by the FISA Court.

Here, of course, Crazy Pete is playing with the meaning of the word “target,” and all but confirming Risen’s other assertion that I treated above that the FISC had been relegated to “reviewing procedures” (and, again, the FISCR shows that that is in fact what FISC did). With this, Crazy Pete tries to deny that US persons in contact with targets will also be wiretapped (remember, too, that the DOJ/NSA/DNI was also demonstrably playing with the meaning of the word “surveillance” throughout the FISA reform process).

Any surveillance targeting Americans in the United States would still require an individual warrant from the FISA court, and any incidental collection of the communications of U.S. persons would still be subject to extensive minimization procedures.  The bill expressly requires such minimization procedures to be imposed on any surveillance conducted under the new law, and those procedures must also be reviewed by the FISA court,

This is where things get interesting. Of course, Crazy Pete is still playing his little game with the word “target.” But then he claims that any US persons “incidentally” collected through the wiretaps of the people overseas would be minimized.

Which brings us to Nidal Hasan.

Granted, Nidal Hasan’s emails to Anwar al-Awlaki were collected under FAA authority, not under PAA authority. So we can’t assume that minimization would be the same. But in August 2007, when he was writing refutations at the behest of NSA, he was claiming that someone like Nidal Hasan’s communication with Awlaki would undergo “extensive minimization.”

Yet for the last week, Crazy Pete has been accusing the Obama Administration of failing to do what it should and could under the law to track Nidal Hasan. He’s even suggesting they weren’t using existing authority that had been used until very recently. I maintain that the fault–at least given the facts we know–lies at Walter Reed, and not with the Joint Task Force that analyzed the emails. But in any case, the only way that Hasan’s emails would have been tracked and Hasan himself would have become a target (or at least a database focus) would be if the emails themselves weren’t minimized.

Crazy Pete circa 2007 is telling Crazy Pete circa 2009 he’s full of shit. Or vice versa. Or both.

There’s a real continuity between this two-year impotent attempt to refute James Risen and his bluster from the last week. At their core, both appear to be attempts to manipulate asymmetric information to grasp powers for NSA that Congress and the American people don’t necessarily support, all while pretending what NSA is doing is what NSA says it’s doing.

Update: Then again, if Hasan’s emails were more belligerent than previously reported, then minimization should not have been an issue at all (though the story remains that the emails were determined not to be threatening, and therefore should have been minimized).

But, after reading his FBI file, you get a renewed sense of what the FBI’s files on Muslims and DOD’s files on peace activists must look like. It’s worth a gander, if only for a reminder of how paranoid–and susceptible to fear-mongerers–our country gets when we begin to profile our citizens because of alleged associations. Among Terkel’s suspicious ties include the National Lawyers Guild and Jewish women’s organizations.

The CUNY NYC NewsService FOIAed Turkel’s file after he passed away last year. Though the FBI just turned over 147 of 269 pages of his file.

The NewsService piece also reminds of Terkel’s NYT op-ed written during the debate about amending FISA in 2007.

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which placed national security investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect, but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

As we continue to wade through the EFF document dump of that legislative battle and engage on the current battle over PATRIOT, it’s worth listening to Studs Terkel once again.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48434860@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Still, there seems an inherent–and glaring–problem with appointing Dana Perino to serve on the Broadcast Board of Governors. It’s this:

Created in 1994, the BBG oversees all of the US government’s non-military international broadcasting outlets, including Voice of America, Alhurra television, Radio Sawa, TV Marti, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. [my emphasis]

As you’ll recall, Perino admitted on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” two years ago that she didn’t know what the fuck the Cuban Missile Crisis was:

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’”

So now Obama is about to make her one of the people overseeing our propaganda outlet blasting into Cuba.

If you suspended disbelief in yesterday’s DOJ oversight hearing and pretend this wasn’t about demagoguing and protecting torturers, the Republican attacks on Eric Holder’s decision to try five of the 9/11 detainees raise good points. They argue:

• The 9/11 conspirators are actually more appropriate defendants for a military commission than some others who will be charged in military commissions
• The standards for who gets tried in a civilian court and who gets tried in a military commission are inconsistent
• Trying al Qaeda detainees in civilian courts may present Miranda challenges to soldiers in Afghanistan
• A civilian trial will take a long time (3 years, according to Mary Jo White) and cost a lot of money ($50 million, according to Chuck Schumer)
• Defendants might get off on legal technicalities
• There were problems alleged to have arisen out of the earlier NYC terrorist trials
• KSM might be able to demand asylum under the Convention Against Torture once in the US

Some of those are, frankly, legitimate concerns. But I said, “pretend this wasn’t about demagoguing,” because even when Holder addressed each of these concerns (though he did admit he’s not an immigration expert), the Republicans continued to attack him on the same grounds. They simply ignored his serious responses to their questions.

But what I found most interesting about the way Republicans not listening to Holder’s answers came in response to Holder’s assertion that the government is more likely to succeed in getting a conviction in Article III Court. The exchange, above, with Kyl, is one of the most heated examples.

Kyl: Surely you’re not arguing that it’s easier to get evidence into an Article III than a military commission. I mean, you made the point that you’re aware of a lot of evidence in this case that others aren’t, of course, but the rules for admitting evidence are more lenient before a military commission than an Article III Court, so that can’t be the basis for your decision, is it?

Holder: That is not necessarily the case. With regard to the evidence that would be elicited in a military commission, evidence elicited from the detainees, from the terrorists as a result of these enhanced interrogation techniques, it is not clear to me, at all, that that information would necessarily be admitted into a military commission, even with the use of a clean team, or that it would withstand appellate scrutiny. And on the basis of that concern and other things, my desire to go to an Article III Court and to minimize the use of that kind of information, that kind of evidence, I thought was paramount.

Yet Kyl all but dismissed this assertion, continuing on to demagogue some more (in this case, by raising one of Andrew McCarthy’s attacks on Holder).

The Attorney General of the United States repeatedly told Congress that the government stands a better chance of getting a conviction in a civilian court, yet Republicans don’t care–they still want their military commissions.

Now, the Republican refusal to consider Holder’s assertion is one thing. But it does raise the question of what Holder meant.

We discussed some of these issues in the David Frakt thread. Significantly, Frakt noted that the judge in the Jawad case ruled that he had the basis to dismiss all charges on the basis of pretrial abuse.

The Judge in the case, Colonel Stephen Henley, had made a couple of rulings in the Jawad case (my case) which made the government very nervous. First, he ruled in response to a motion to dismiss that I filed on the basis of torture that he “beyond peradventure” had the power to dismiss all charges on the basis of pretrial abuse of the detainee. [my emphasis]

And that–Frakt suggests later in that comment–might lead a military judge to deny the death penalty to make up for the fact that KSM had been waterboarded 183 times. In addition, both Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh have active challenges to the constitutionality of the military commissions, which, at the very least would hold up the military commissions themselves (even assuming that they were found to be constitutional).

Holder seems to be accounting for some of these factors–as well as noting that a death penalty case should be heard in the place where the crime occurred. But he also seems to be suggesting that it will be easier to present the evidence he feels the government should use to try its case against KSM and the others. (I sort of suspect he thinks it might be easier to bracket off any consideration of KSM’s torture in a civilian trial–though I’m curious what the lawyers think about this.)

I’m going to look more closely at what Holder might be thinking.

But the bottom line is this: the country’s top law enforcement officer says we are most likely to win a conviction of KSM in a civilian trial. But Republicans want their military commission anyway.

Not like it’ll matter to Republicans who are attacking Eric Holder’s decision. But Sheldon Whitehouse slammed Republicans for beating up on federal prosecutors.

And then he got really steamed, accusing the Republicans of politicizing prosecutorial opinions.

From my perspective, popular opinion is a very dangerous bellwether to hold prosecutors to. … I think it gets worse when you move from popular opinion to legislative opinion. … And if there’s any way to make, it worse it’d be to allow it to be influenced by talk show opinion.

That was then, this is now; and now the Maersk Alabama, yep the same damn ship, has been involved in yet another pirate attack. This time, however, the pesky pirates were fended off by an onboard security team. From The Guardian:

Somali pirates attacked the container ship Maersk Alabama today for the second time in seven months. Private guards on board the US-flagged ship repelled the attack with gunfire and a high-decibel noise device.
…
Four pirates in a skiff attacked the ship again today at about 6.30am local time, opening fire with automatic weapons from about 300 yards away, a statement from the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said. A security team repelled the attack by using evasive manoeuvres, small-arms fire and a Long Range Acoustic Device, which can beam earsplitting alarm tones.

Vice Admiral Bill Gortney of the US naval forces central command said the Maersk Alabama had followed the maritime industry’s best practices in having a security team on board. “This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take proactive action to prevent being attacked and why we recommend that ships follow industry best practices if they’re in high-risk areas,” he said in a statement.

Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the Chatham House thinktank in London, said the international maritime community was solidly against armed guards, but that American ships have taken a different line.

Aye, they be rough seas for teh Alabama, but she made it through unscathed this time. If you are wondering why the Maersk Alabama was back at it on the same route, refer back to this old post, which explains that when transporting American humanitarian relief supplies, organizations must use a ship chartered in the US, US flagged, and American crew pursuant to US law. There are not that many available for this task, and the Alabama is one of them. Fascinating factoid: the respective captains of the Alabama for the two pirate attacks are good friends and side by side classmates together at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Go figure.

And that is not the only news from the haunts of Davy Jones on the front burner today. Oh no. Back in March, as you may recall, an US submarine had a little ooopsie and collided with an US warship. Turns out it was because those randy sailors were too busy kickin out the jams with their rigged up juke joint boom boxes in the control rooms. From the New York Times the results of the Navy investigation are announced:

The crew aboard a U.S. submarine made dozens of errors before the vessel collided with an American warship in the Persian Gulf, an accident that exposed lax leaders who tolerated sleeping, slouching and a radio room rigged with music speakers, a Navy review found.

Navy investigators placed blame for the March collision on the submarine’s ”ineffective and negligent command leadership,” including what they called a lack of standards and failure to adequately plan for crossing the busy Strait of Hormuz.

Radios? Wacky behavior? The Straits of Hormuz?? Oh yeah, you just know the real culprit is The Filipino Monkey! Oh, and by the way, that darn Filipino Monkey haunts the Potomac too!