Security Weekly- .Aviation Security Threats and Realities November 23, 2010

By Scott Stewart


Over the past few weeks, aviation security — specifically, enhanced passenger-screening procedures — has become a big issue in the media. The discussion of the topic has become even more fervent as we enter Thanksgiving weekend, which is historically one of the busiest travel periods of the year. As this discussion has progressed, we have been asked repeatedly by readers and members of the press for our opinion on the matter.


We have answered such requests from readers, and we have done a number of media interviews, but we’ve resisted writing a fresh analysis on aviation security because, as an organization, our objective is to lead the media rather than follow the media regarding a particular topic. We want our readers to be aware of things before they become pressing public issues, and when it comes to aviation-security threats and the issues involved with passenger screening, we believe we have accomplished this. Many of the things now being discussed in the media are things we’ve written about for years.


When we were discussing this topic internally and debating whether to write about it, we decided that since we have added so many new readers over the past few years, it might be of interest to our expanding readership to put together an analysis that reviews the material we’ve published and that helps to place the current discussion into the proper context. We hope our longtime readers will excuse the repetition.


We believe that this review will help establish that there is a legitimate threat to aviation, that there are significant challenges in trying to secure aircraft from every conceivable threat, and that the response of aviation security authorities to threats has often been slow and reactive rather than thoughtful and proactive.


Threats


Commercial aviation has been threatened by terrorism for decades now. From the first hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s to last month’s attempt against the UPS and FedEx cargo aircraft, the threat has remained constant. As we have discussed for many years, jihadists have long had a fixation with attacking aircraft. When security measures were put in place to protect against Bojinka-style attacks in the 1990s — attacks that involved modular explosive devices smuggled onto planes and left aboard — the jihadists adapted and conducted 9/11-style attacks. When security measures were put in place to counter 9/11-style attacks, the jihadists quickly responded by going to onboard suicide attacks with explosive devices concealed in shoes. When that tactic was discovered and shoes began to be screened, they switched to devices containing camouflaged liquid explosives. When that plot failed and security measures were altered to restrict the quantity of liquids that people could take aboard aircraft, we saw the jihadists alter the paradigm once more and attempt the underwear-bomb attack last Christmas.


In a special edition of Inspire magazine released last weekend, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) noted that, due to the increased passenger screening implemented after the Christmas Day 2009 attempt, the group’s operational planners decided to employ explosive devices sent via air cargo (we have written specifically about the vulnerability of air cargo to terrorist attacks).


Finally, it is also important to understand that the threat does not emanate just from jihadists like al Qaeda and its regional franchises. Over the past several decades, aircraft have been attacked by a number of different actors, including North Korean intelligence officers, Sikh, Palestinian and Hezbollah militants and mentally disturbed individuals like the Unabomber, among others.


Realities


While understanding that the threat is very real, it is also critical to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute, foolproof security. This applies to ground-based facilities as well as aircraft. If security procedures and checks have not been able to keep contraband out of high-security prisons, it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to keep unauthorized items off aircraft, where (thankfully) security checks of crew and passengers are far less invasive than they are for prisoners. As long as people, luggage and cargo are allowed aboard aircraft, and as long as people on the ground crew and the flight crew have access to aircraft, aircraft will remain vulnerable to a number of internal and external threats.


This reality is accented by the sheer number of passengers that must be screened and number of aircraft that must be secured. According to figures supplied by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, the agency screened 708,400,522 passengers on domestic flights and international flights coming into the United States. This averages out to over 1.9 million passengers per day.


Another reality is that, as mentioned above, jihadists and other people who seek to attack aircraft have proven to be quite resourceful and adaptive. They carefully study security measures, identify vulnerabilities and then seek to exploit them. Indeed, last September, when we analyzed the innovative designs of the explosive devices employed by AQAP, we called attention to the threat they posed to aviation more than three months before the Christmas 2009 bombing attempt. As we look at the issue again, it is not hard to see, as we pointed out then, how their innovative efforts to camouflage explosives in everyday items and hide them inside suicide operatives’ bodies will continue and how these efforts will be intended to exploit vulnerabilities in current screening systems.


As we wrote in September 2009, getting a completed explosive device or its components by security and onto an aircraft is a significant challenge, but it is possible for a resourceful bombmaker to devise ways to overcome that challenge. The latest issue of Inspire magazine demonstrated how AQAP has done some very detailed research to identify screening vulnerabilities. As the group noted in the magazine: “The British government said that if a toner weighs more than 500 grams it won’t be allowed on board a plane. Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion? Do you think that we have nothing to send but printers?”


AQAP also noted in the magazine that it is working to identify innocuous substances like toner ink that, when X-rayed, will appear similar to explosive compounds like PETN, since such innocuous substances will be ignored by screeners. With many countries now banning cargo from Yemen, it will be harder to send those other items in cargo from Sanaa, but the group has shown itself to be flexible, with the underwear-bomb operative beginning his trip to Detroit out of Nigeria rather than Yemen. In the special edition of Inspire, AQAP also specifically threatened to work with allies to launch future attacks from other locations.


Drug couriers have been transporting narcotics hidden inside their bodies aboard aircraft for decades, and prisoners frequently hide drugs, weapons and even cell phones inside body cavities. It is therefore only a matter of time before this same tactic is used to smuggle plastic explosives or even an entire non-metallic explosive device onto an aircraft — something that would allow an attacker to bypass metal detectors and backscatter X-ray inspection and pass through external pat-downs.


Look for the Bomber, Not Just the Bomb


This ability to camouflage explosives in a variety of different ways, or hide them inside the bodies of suicide operatives, means that the most significant weakness of any suicide-attack plan is the operative assigned to conduct the attack. Even in a plot to attack 10 or 12 aircraft, a group would need to manufacture only about 12 pounds of high explosives — about what is required for a single, small suicide device and far less than is required for a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. Because of this, the operatives are more of a limiting factor than the explosives themselves; it is far more difficult to find and train 10 or 12 suicide bombers than it is to produce 10 or 12 devices.


A successful attack requires operatives who are not only dedicated enough to initiate a suicide device without getting cold feet; they must also possess the nerve to calmly proceed through airport security checkpoints without alerting officers that they are up to something sinister. This set of tradecraft skills is referred to as demeanor, and while remaining calm under pressure and behaving normally may sound simple in theory, practicing good demeanor under the extreme pressure of a suicide operation is very difficult. Demeanor has proved to be the Achilles’ heel of several terror plots, and it is not something that militant groups have spent a great deal of time teaching their operatives. Because of this, it is frequently easier to spot demeanor mistakes than it is to find well-hidden explosives. Such demeanor mistakes can also be accentuated, or even induced, by contact with security personnel in the form of interviews, or even by unexpected changes in security protocols that alter the security environment a potential attacker is anticipating and has planned for.


There has been much discussion of profiling, but the difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling based only on race, ethnicity or religion is doomed to fail. In fact, profiling can prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.


In an environment where the potential threat is hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what we refer to as focusing on the “how” instead of the “who.” Instead of relying on physical profiles, which allow attack planners to select operatives who do not match the profiles being selected for more intensive screening, security personnel should be encouraged to exercise their intelligence, intuition and common sense. A Caucasian U.S. citizen who shows up at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi or Dhaka claiming to have lost his passport may be far more dangerous than some random Pakistani or Yemeni citizen, even though the American does not appear to fit the profile for requiring extra security checks.


However, when we begin to consider traits such as intelligence, intuition and common sense, one of the other realities that must be faced with aviation security is that, quite simply, it is not an area where the airlines or governments have allocated the funding required to hire the best personnel. Airport screeners make far less than FBI special agents or CIA case officers and receive just a fraction of the training. Before 9/11, most airports in the United States relied on contract security guards to conduct screening duties. After 9/11, many of these same officers went from working for companies like Wackenhut to being TSA employees. There was no real effort made to increase the quality of screening personnel by offering much higher salaries to recruit a higher caliber of candidate.


There is frequent mention of the need to make U.S. airport security more like that employed in Israel. Aside from the constitutional and cultural factors that would prevent American airport screeners from ever treating Muslim travelers the way they are treated by El Al, another huge difference is simply the amount of money spent on salaries and training for screeners and other security personnel. El Al is also aided by the fact that it has a very small fleet of aircraft that fly only a small number of passengers to a handful of destinations.


Additionally, airport screening duty is simply not glamorous work. Officers are required to work long shifts conducting monotonous checks and are in near constant contact with a traveling public that can at times become quite surly when screeners follow policies established by bureaucrats at much higher pay grades. Granted, there are TSA officers who abuse their authority and do not exhibit good interpersonal skills, but anyone who travels regularly has also witnessed fellow travelers acting like idiots.


While it is impossible to keep all contraband off aircraft, efforts to improve technical methods and procedures to locate weapons and IED components must continue. However, these efforts must not only be reacting to past attacks and attempts but should also be looking forward to thwart future attacks that involve a shift in the terrorist paradigm. At the same time, the often-overlooked human elements of airport security, including situational awareness, observation and intuition, need to be emphasized now more than ever. It is those soft skills that hold the real key to looking for the bomber and not just the bomb.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR

Dispatch: North Korea Shells a South Korean Island | STRATFOR

Update on North Korea shelling the South Korean island

Dispatch: North Korea Shells a South Korean Island | STRATFOR

Electric Motorcycle

I've not been a fan of electric cars.  I think the Chevy Volt will be a massive waste of money and the electric car is impractical until sometime after battery technology makes a massive leap forward.

That being said this looks interesting.  May have a use in a small town or in the center of a larger city where driving a car may not be practical.

The Los Angeles Police Department is now field-testing the Vectrix VX-3, a unique three-wheeled electric patrol vehicle that will be available in the spring. The LAPD is testing the scooter-type vehicle at the city's LA Live entertainment complex that includes Staples Center. The vehicle was debuted at the 2010 COPSWEST trade show.

Geopolitical Journey, Part 3: Romania, November 9, 2010

Hi all..I didn't realize until a friend mentioned this was black lettering on a black background...kind of a challenge to read.  Here is the article in a better format....

Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States.


Special Series: Geopolitical Journey with George Friedman


By George Friedman


In school, many of us learned the poem Invictus. It concludes with the line, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” This is a line that a Victorian gentleman might bequeath to an American businessman. It is not a line that resonates in Romania. Nothing in their history tells Romanians that they rule their fate or dominate their soul. Everything in their history is a lesson in how fate masters them or how their very soul is a captive of history. As a nation, Romanians have modest hopes and expectations tempered by their past.


This sensibility is not alien to me. My parents survived the Nazi death camps, returned to Hungary to try to rebuild their lives and then found themselves fleeing the communists. When they arrived in America, their wishes were extraordinarily modest, as I look back on it. They wanted to be safe, to get up in the morning, to go to work, to get paid — to live. They were never under the impression that they were the masters of their fate.


The problem that Romania has is that the world cares about it. More precisely, empires collide where Romania is. The last iteration was the Cold War. Today, at the moment, things seem easier, or at least less desperate, than before. Still, as I discussed in Borderlands, the great powers are sorting themselves out again and therefore Romania is becoming more important to others. It is not clear to me that the Romanians fully appreciate the shift in the geopolitical winds. They think they can hide in Europe, and perhaps they can. But I suspect that history is reaching for Romania again.


Geopolitics and Self-Mutilation


Begin with geography. The Carpathian Mountains define Romania, but in an odd way. Rather than serving as the border of the country, protecting it, the Carpathians are an arc that divides the country into three parts. To the south of the mountains is the Wallachian Plain, the heart of contemporary Romania, where its capital, Bucharest, and its old oil center, Ploesti, are located. In the east of the Carpathians is the Moldavian Plain. To the northwest of the Carpathians is Transylvania, more rugged, hilly country.

And this is the geopolitical tragedy of Romania. Romania is one nation divided by its geography. None of the three parts is easy to defend. Transylvania came under Hungarian rule in the 11th century, and Hungary came under Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. Wallachia came under Ottoman rule, and Moldavia came under Ottoman and Russian rule. About the only time before the late 19th century that Romania was united was when it was completely conquered. And the only time it was completely conquered was when some empire wanted to secure the Carpathians to defend itself.


Some of us experience geopolitics as an opportunity. Most of humanity experiences it as a catastrophe. Romania has been a nation for a long time, but rarely has it been a united nation-state. After becoming a nation-state in the late 19th century, it had a precarious existence, balanced between Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia, with Germany a more distant but powerful reality. Romania spent the inter-war years trying to find its balance between monarchy, authoritarianism and fascism, and it never quite found it. It sought safety in an alliance with Hitler and found itself on the front lines in the German invasion of Russia. To understand Romania as an ally one must bear this in mind: When the Soviets began their great counterattack at Stalingrad, they launched it over Romanian (and Hungarian) troops. Romanians maneuvered themselves into the position of fighting and dying for the Germans, and then got their revenge on the Germans by being slaughtered by the Soviets.


All of this led to Romania’s occupation by the Soviets, toward whom the Romanians developed a unique strategy. The Hungarians rose up against the Soviets and were crushed, and the Czechoslovaks tried to create a liberal communist regime that was still loyal to the Soviets and were crushed. The Romanians actually achieved a degree of autonomy from the Soviets in foreign affairs. The way the Romanians got the Soviets to tolerate this was by building a regime more rigid and oppressive than even that of the Soviet Union at the time. The Soviets knew NATO wasn’t going to invade, let alone invade through Romania. So long as the Romanian regime kept the people in line, the Russians could tolerate their maneuvers. Romania retained its national identity and an independent foreign policy but at a stunning price in personal freedom and economic well-being.


Contemporary Romania cannot be understood without understanding Nicolae Ceausescu. He called himself the “Genius of the Carpathians.” He may well have been, but if so, the Carpathian definition of genius is idiosyncratic. The Romanian communist government was built around communists who had remained in Romania during World War II, in prison or in hiding. This was unique among the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites. Stalin didn’t trust communists who stayed home and resisted. He preferred communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1930s and had proved themselves loyal to Stalin by their betrayal of others. He sent Moscow communists to rule the rest of the newly occupied countries that buffered Russia from the West. Not so in Romania, where native communists ruled. After the death of the founder of communist Romania, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, another Romanian communist who stayed in Romania ultimately took over: Ceausescu. This was a peculiarity of Romanian communism that made it more like Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia in foreign policy, and more like a bad dream in domestic policy.


Ceausescu decided to pay off the national debt. His reason seemed to flow from his foreign policy — he didn’t want Romania to be trapped by any country because of its debt — and he repaid it by selling to other countries nearly everything that was produced in Romania. This left Romania in staggering poverty; electricity and heat were occasional things, and even food was scarce in a country that had a lot of it. The Securitate, a domestic secret police whose efficiency and brutality were impressive, suppressed unrest. Nothing in Romania worked as well as the Securitate.


Herta Muller is a Romanian author who writes in German (she is part of Romania’s ethnic German community) and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. One of her books, The Appointment, takes place in Romania under the communists. It gives an extraordinary sense of a place ruled by the Securitate. It is about a woman who is living her life, working at her job and dealing with an alcoholic husband while constantly preparing for and living in dread of appointments with the secret police. As in Kafka, what they are looking for and what she is hiding are unclear. But the danger is unrelenting and permeates her entire consciousness. When one reads this book, as I did in preparing for this trip, one understands the way in which the Securitate tore apart a citizen’s soul — and remembers that it was not a distant relic of the 1930s but was still in place and sustaining the Romanian regime in 1989.


It was as if the price that Romania had to pay for autonomy was to punch itself in the face continually. Even the fall of communism took a Romanian path. There was no Velvet Revolution here but a bloody one, where the Securitate resisted the anti-communist rising under circumstances and details that are still hotly debated and unclear. In the end, the Ceausescus (Nicolae’s wife Elena was also a piece of work, requiring a psychological genius to unravel) were executed and the Securitate blended into civil society as part of the organized-crime network that was mistaken for liberalization in the former Soviet empire by Western academics and reporters at the time.


Romania emerged from the previous 70 years of ongoing catastrophe by dreaming of simple things and having no illusions that these things were easy to come by or things Romanians could control. As with much of Eastern Europe but perhaps with a greater intensity, Romanians believed their redemption lay with the West’s multilateral organizations. If they were permitted to join NATO and especially the European Union, their national security needs would be taken care of along with their economic needs. Romanians yearned to become European simply because being Romanian was too dangerous.


The Redemption of Being European


In thinking of Romania, the phrase “institutionalized prisoner” comes to mind. In the United States it is said that if someone stays in prison long enough, he becomes “institutionalized,” someone who can no longer imagine functioning outside a world where someone else always tells him what to do. For Romania, national sovereignty has always been experienced as the process of accommodating itself to more powerful nations and empires. So after 1991, Romania searched for the “someone else” to which it could subordinate itself. More to the point, Romania imbued these entities with extraordinary redemptive powers. Once in NATO and the European Union, all would be well.


And until recently, all has been well, or well in terms of the modest needs of a historical victim. The problem Romania has is that these sanctuaries are in many ways illusions. It looks to NATO for defense, but NATO is a hollowed-out entity. There is a new and ambitious NATO strategy, which sets a global agenda for the organization. Long discussed, it is an exercise in meaninglessness. Countries like Germany have no military with which to fulfill the strategy, assuming that any agreement to act could be reached. NATO is a consensual organization, and a single member can block any mission. The divergent interests of an expanded NATO guarantee that someone will block everything. NATO is an illusion that comforts the Romanians, but only if they don’t look carefully. The Romanians seem to prefer the comforting illusion.

As for the European Union, there is a deep structural tension in the system. The main European economic power is Germany. It is also the world’s second-largest exporter. Its economy is built around exporting. For a country like Romania, economic development requires that it take advantage of its wage advantage. Lower wages allow developing countries to develop their economy through exports. But Europe is dominated by an export superpower. Unlike the postwar world, where the United States absorbed the imports of Germany and Japan without needing to compete with them, Germany remains an exporting country exporting into Romania and leaving precious little room for Romania to develop its economy.


At this stage of its development, Romania should be running a trade surplus, particularly with Germany, but it is not. In 2007, it exported about $40 billion worth of goods and imported about $70 billion. In 2009, it exported the same $40 billion but cut imports to only $54 billion (still a negative). Forty percent of its trade is with Germany, France and Italy, its major EU partners. But it is Germany where the major problem is. And this problem is compounded by the fact that a good part of Romania’s exports to Germany are from German-owned firms operating in Romania.


During the period of relative prosperity in Europe from 1991 to 2008, the structural reality of the EU was hidden under a rising tide. In 2008 the tide went out, revealing the structural reality. It is not clear when the tide of prosperity will come rolling back in. In the meantime, while the German economy is growing again, Romania’s is not. Because it exists in a system where the main engine is an exporter, and the exporter dominates the process of setting rules, it is difficult to see how Romania can take advantage of its greatest asset — a skilled workforce prepared to work for lower wages.


Add to this the regulatory question. Romania is a developing country. Europe’s regulations are drawn with a focus on the highly developed countries. The laws on employment guarantees mean that Europeans don’t hire workers, they adopt them. That means that entrepreneurship is difficult. Being an entrepreneur, as I well know, means making mistakes and recovering from them fast. Given the guarantees that every worker has in Europe, an entrepreneur cannot quickly recover from his mistakes. In Romania, the agility needed for risk-taking is not readily available under EU rules drawn up for a mature economy.


Romania should be a country of small entrepreneurs, and it is, but there is extensive evasion of Brussels’ — and Bucharest’s — regulations. It is a gray market that creates legal jeopardy and therefore corruption in the sector that Romania needs the most. Imagine if Germany had the regulations it champions today in 1955. Could it possibly have developed into what it is in 2010? There may be a time for these regulations (and that is debatable), but for Romania it is not now.


I met a Romanian entrepreneur who marketed industrial products. In talking to him, I raised the question of the various regulations governing his industry and how he handled them. There was no clear answer or, more precisely, I didn’t realize the answer he had given me until later. There are regulations and there are relationships. The latter mitigate the former. In Germany this might be called corruption. In Romania it is survival. A Romanian entrepreneur rigorously following EU regulations would rapidly go out of business. It may be that Romania is corrupt, but the regulatory structure of the EU imposed on a developing economy makes evasion the only rational strategy. And yet the entrepreneur I talked to was a champion of the European Union. He too hoped for the time when he could be a normal European. As Rousseau said, “I have seen these contradictions and they have not rebuffed me.”


It is difficult to for an outsider to see the specific benefits of NATO and EU membership for Romania. But for the Romanians, membership goes beyond the specifics.


Romania’s Choice


August and September are bad months in Europe. It is when wars and crises strike. August and September 2008 were bad months. That August, Russia struck Georgia. In September, the financial crisis burst wide open. In the first, Russia delivered a message to the region: This is what American guarantees are worth. In the European handling of the financial crisis in Eastern Europe, the Germans delivered a message on the limits of German responsibility. Both NATO and the European Union went from being guarantors of Romanian interests to being enormous question marks.


In my conversations with Romanians, at all levels and almost universally, I have found the same answer. First, there is no doubt that NATO and the European Union did not work in Romania’s favor at the moment. Second, there is no question of rethinking Romania’s commitment to either. There are those Romanians, particularly on the far right, who dislike the European Union in particular, but Romania has no strategic alternative.


As for the vast majority, they cannot and will not conceive of a Romania outside the confines of NATO and the European Union. The mere fact that neither is working well for Romania does not mean that they do not do something important: NATO and the European Union keep the anti-democratic demons of the Romanian soul at bay. Being part of Europe is not simply a matter of strategic or economic benefits. It represents a transitional point in Romanian history. With membership in the European Union and NATO, Romania has affirmed its modernity and its democratic institutions. These twin amulets have redeemed Romania’s soul. Given this, I suppose, an unfavorable trade balance and the absence of genuine security guarantees is a small price to pay. I am not Romanian, so I can’t feel their ineffable belief in Brussels.


Romanians do acknowledge, again almost universally, the return of Russia to the historical stage, and it worries them. Of particular concern is Moldova, a region to the east that was historically Romanian, taken by the Soviets in a treaty with Hitler and the rest of which was seized after World War II. Moldova became an independent country in 1991 (a country I will be visiting next). For much of the post-Cold War period it had a communist government that fell a few years ago. An election will be held on Nov. 28, and it appears that the communists might return. The feeling is that if the communists return this time, the Russians will return with them and, in the coming years, Russian troops will be on Romania’s borders.


Romanian officials are actively engaged in discussions with NATO officials about the Russians, but the Germans want a more active involvement of Russia in NATO and not tension between NATO and Russia. The Western Europeans are not about to be drawn into Eastern European paranoia fed by nostalgic American strategists wanting to relive the Cold War, as they think of it.


I raised two strategic alternatives with Romanian officials and the media. One was the Intermarium — an alliance, perhaps in NATO, perhaps not — of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (To readers who asked why I did not go to Bulgaria on this trip, it was simply a matter of time. I will go there as soon as I can.) Very interestingly, one official pointed out substantial levels of cooperation on military planning between Hungary and Romania and discussions between Romania and Poland. How serious this is and whether it will go beyond the NATO context is unclear to me. Perhaps I can get a better sense in Warsaw.


But military planning is one thing; the wherewithal to execute military plans is quite another. The Romanians are now caught in a crisis over buying fighter planes. There are three choices: the Swedish Gripen, the Eurofighter and used American F-16s. The problem is that the Romanians don’t have the money for any of these aircraft, nor does it seem to me that these are the defense measures they really need. The Americans can provide air cover in a number of ways, and while 24 F-16s would have value, they would not solve Romania’s most pressing military problem. From where I sit, creating an effective mobile force to secure their eastern frontier is what is needed. The alternative I’ve heard was buying naval vessels to block a very real Russian naval buildup in the Black Sea. But if Romania has trouble buying 24 fighters, naval vessels are out of the question.


The Romanians are approaching defense planning from a NATO perspective — one used for planning, not implementation, and one that always leads to sophisticated systems while leaving the basics uncovered. This may seem like an unnecessary level of detail for this essay, but the Romanians are deep in this discussion, and questions like this are the critical details of strategies growing out of geopolitics. It is the difference between planning papers drawn up by think tanks and the ability to defend a nation.


The Black Sea is a critical part of Romania’s reality, and the rise of Turkey makes the system of relationships interesting. Turkey is Romania’s fourth-largest export target, and one of the few major trading partners that imports more from Romania than it exports. I pointed out to Romanians that it is the great good fortune of Turkey that it was not admitted to the European Union. Turkey’s economy grew by an annualized rate of 12 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and has been surging for years.


Turkey is becoming a regional economic engine and, unlike Germany, France and Italy, it offers compatibilities and synergies for Romania. In addition, Turkey is a serious military force and, while not seeking confrontation with Russia, it is not subservient to it. Turkey has adopted a “360 degree” strategy of engagement with all countries. And since Turkey is a NATO member, as are Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, there is no incompatibility with a dual strategy of the Intermarium and the Black Sea. For now, they fit. And the irony of Romania reaching out to the heir to the Ottomans is simply that and no more. This is the neighborhood that Romania inhabits. These are the options it has.


What doesn’t fit for Romania is the NATO/EU system alone. Perhaps this is part of a rational mix, but it cannot be all of it. For Romania, the problem is to move beyond the psychological comfort of Europe to a strategic and economic understanding that accepts that the post-Cold War world is over. More important, it would be a move toward accepting that Romania is free, responsible for its future and capable of managing it.


It is this last step that is the hardest for Romania and many of the former Soviet satellites — which were also bound up with World War I and Hitler’s disaster — to come to terms with. There is a connection between buying more expensive German cars than you can afford, and more of them than you need, and the novels of Herta Muller. The appointment can be permanently canceled, but the fear of the interrogation is always with you. In this region, the fear of the past dominates and oppresses while the confident, American-style military planning and economic restructuring I suggested is alien and frightening.


The Romanians emerged from a world of horror, some of it of their own making. They fear themselves perhaps more than they fear others. For them, becoming European is both a form of therapy and something that will restrain the demons within and without. When you live with bad memories, you live with the shadows of reality. For the Romanians, illusory solutions to haunting memories make a great deal of sense.


It makes sense until war comes, and in this part of the world, the coming of war has been the one certainty since before the Romans. It is only a question of when, with whom and what your own fate will be when it arrives. The Romanians believe with religious fervor that these things will be left behind if they become part of Europe. I am more skeptical. I had thought that Romania’s problem was that it was part of Europe, a weak power surrounded by stronger ones. They seem to believe that their solution is to be part of Europe, a weak power surrounded by stronger ones.


I leave Romania confused. The Romanians hear things that I am deaf to. It is even at a pitch my Hungarian part can’t hear. I leave now for another nation, Moldova, which has been even more exposed to history, one even stranger and more brutal than Romania’s.

Geopolitical Journey, Part 3: Romania is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

Gloria Allred likes being patted down...ok

Last month I posted on the camera chaser Gloria Allred and how she hung that illegal alien out to dry...don't get between Gloria and a camera.

Now she's showing a softer side to herself

RealClearPolitics - Video - Gloria Allred On TSA Pat-Down: "I Liked It"
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: "Did they touch your body parts?"


GLORIA ALLRED: "Yeah, they did and it was a first time anybody touched them in a long time and frankly, I liked it," Gloria Allred."

OK...to borrow a great phrase from a friend of mine "I don't want to know you that well Gloria"

Professional Courtesy and the TSA

Fellow officers and I occasionally have a philosophical discussion. Who gets professional courtesy?

For those who don’t know it this is the fact cops don’t ticket other police officers, etc. Yes, we cover our own…like sharks and lawyers.

Now I personally extend it to others…firefighters, military, etc. But one group is not law enforcement in my eyes and never will be.  The taxpayer funded molisters you find at airports now sometimes known as the TSA inspectors.

Real emergency services (cops, firemen, medics, military, etc) work to keep society safe and providing the essential services needed for the public. TSA is only a façade for securing our air travel (and I expect to be extended to bus and train services before you know it) and sorry guys, I don’t see you as law enforcement.

To put this in perspective if a bad guy was in the airport would you move towards him (like cops must) or away? I think we know the answer to that.

Any cops out there…if you pulled over a TSA agent would he be extended the same courtesy shown a man with a real badge?

Again Charles Krauthammer comes up with a great one for everyone

I've always respected Charles Krauthammer and his columns are as insightful as they come.  And he's it putting up the new rallying cry for American Liberty.

Don't Touch My Junk!

Hey it's not quite "Give me liberty or give me death!" but it gets the point accross.
 Thank you Charles for another one out of the park!

Charles Krauthammer - Don't touch my junk

Ah, the airport, where modern folk heroes are made. The airport, where that inspired flight attendant did what everyone who's ever been in the spam-in-a-can crush of a flying aluminum tube - where we collectively pretend that a clutch of peanuts is a meal and a seat cushion is a "flotation device" - has always dreamed of doing: pull the lever, blow the door, explode the chute, grab a beer, slide to the tarmac and walk through the gates to the sanity that lies beyond. Not since Rick and Louis disappeared into the Casablanca fog headed for the Free French garrison in Brazzaville has a stroll on the tarmac thrilled so many...


...And now three months later, the newest airport hero arrives. His genius was not innovation in getting out, but deconstructing the entire process of getting in. John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security's newest brainstorm - the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett's, warning the agent not to "touch my junk."


Not quite the 18th-century elegance of "Don't Tread on Me," but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.


Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

...That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives - when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.


The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn't need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning "I rely on God," killing all on board.


But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches...


...But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?


This time you have gone too far, Big Bro'. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don't touch my junk.

Officer Down

Senior Corrections Officer John H. (Packy) Paskewicz

Maine Department of Corrections
End of Watch: Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Age: 58
Tour of Duty: 20 years
Cause of Death: Heart attack

Senior Corrections Officer John Paskewicz suffered a fatal heart attack while participating in a training exercise on defending against attacks with edged weapons.

He had just completed one of the scenarios and was speaking to his son, who also serves as a corrections officer, and other officers when he suddenly collapsed. The officers immediately began CPR until paramedics arrived but were unable to revive him.

Officer Paskewicz was a U.S. Army and Navy veteran of the Vietnam War. He had served with the Maine Department of Corrections for 20 years and was assigned to the Maine Correctional Center.

Rest in Peace Bro…We’ll Continue The Watch

Day is done, Gone the sun, From the lake, From the hills, From the sky. All is well, Safely rest, God is nigh.

IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World's Wealth”

Before I start my comments on this take a look at the mini bio at from the bottom of the article.

Ottmar Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and Youba Sokona from Mali.

As you can see this man has something to do with the global warming, err global climate change scheme over the last twenty years.  Let's see what he has to say now:

IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World's Wealth”

Neue Zürcher Zeitung .Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated.

OK…why is an economist so prominent in a conference where you would think it would be filled with scientists and engineers? Just curious.

Now here is the full interview.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14 November 2010


Interview: Bernard Potter


NZZ am Sonntag: Mr. Edenhofer, everybody concerned with climate protection demands emissions reductions. You now speak of "dangerous emissions reduction." What do you mean?


Ottmar Edenhofer: So far economic growth has gone hand in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. One percent growth means one percent more emissions. The historic memory of mankind remembers: In order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas. And therefore, the emerging economies fear CO2 emission limits.


But everybody should take part in climate protection, otherwise it does not work.


That is so easy to say. But particularly the industrialized countries have a system that relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels. There is no historical precedent and no region in the world that has decoupled its economic growth from emissions. Thus, you cannot expect that India or China will regard CO2 emissions reduction as a great idea. And it gets worse: We are in the midst of a renaissance of coal, because oil and gas (sic) have become more expensive, but coal has not. The emerging markets are building their cities and power plants for the next 70 years, as if there would be permanently no high CO 2 price.


The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.


That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.


That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.


Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.


De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.


First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.


Nevertheless, the environment is suffering from climate change - especially in the global south.  It will be a lot to do with adaptation. But that just goes far beyond traditional development policy: We will see in Africa with climate change a decline in agricultural yields. But this can be avoided if the efficiency of production is increased - and especially if the African agricultural trade is embedded in the global economy. But for that we need to see that successful climate policy requires other global trade and financial policies.


The great misunderstanding of the UN summit in Rio in 1992 is repeated in the climate policy: the developed countries talk about environment, the developing countries about development.


It is even more complicated. In the 1980s, our local environmental problems were luxury problems for the developing countries. If you already fed and own a car, you can get concerned about acid rain. For China, the problem was how to get 600 million Chinese people in the middle class. Whether there was a coal power plant or whether the labour standards in the coal mines were low was second priority - as it was here in the 19th Century.


But the world has become smaller.  Now something new happens: it is no longer just our luxury, our environment. Developing countries have realized that causes of climate change lie in the north and the consequences in the south. And in developed countries, we have realized that for a climate protection target of two degrees neither purely technical solutions nor life style change will be sufficient. The people here in Europe have the grotesque idea that shopping in the bio food store or electric cars will solve the problem. This is arrogant because the ecological footprint of our lifestyle has increased in the last 30 years, despite the eco-movement.


NZZ am Sonntag:  You say that for successful climate policy a high degree of international cooperation is necessary. However this cooperation is not present. I share the scepticism. But do we have an alternative?


Ottmar Edenhofer:  Currently, there are three ideas how to avoid the difficult cooperation: We try unsafe experiments such as geo-engineering, focus on the development of clean and safe energy, or one trusts in regional and local solutions. However, there is no indication that any of these ideas solves the problem. We must want the cooperation, just as you work together for the regulation of financial markets.  But unlike the financial crisis, in climate policy a country benefits if it does not join in.  The financial crisis was an emergency operation - in the face of danger we behave more cooperatively. Such a thing will not happen in climate policy, because it will always remain questionable whether a specific event like a flood is a climate phenomenon. But there is always the risk that individual rationality leads to collective stupidity. Therefore, one cannot solve the climate problem alone, but it has to be linked to other problems. There must be penalties and incentives: global CO 2-tariffs and technology transfer.


NZZ am Sonntag:  In your new book you talk much about ethics. Do ethics play a role in climate negotiations?


Ottmar Edenhofer:  Ethics always play a role when it comes to power. China and Latin America, for example, always emphasize the historical responsibility of developed countries for climate change. This responsibility is not to deny, but it is also a strategic argument for these countries. I would accept the responsibility for the period since 1995 because we know since then, what is causing the greenhouse effect. To extend the responsibility to the industrial revolution is not ethically justified.


NZZ am Sonntag:  Could we the ethics in order to break the gridlock?


Ottmar Edenhofer:  The book contains a parable: A group of hikers, who represent the world community, walks through a desert. The industrialized nations drink half of the water and then say generously: “Let us share the rest." The others reply: “This is not possible; you have already drunk half of the water. Let us talk first about your historical responsibility." I think if we are arguing about the water supply because we cannot agree on the ethical principles, then we will die of thirst. What we need to look for is an oasis that is the non-carbon global economy. It's about the common departure for this oasis.

Well I’ve give him this…he’s not the pure bred hypocrite ALGORE and others are and he honest. He wants to take wealth from developed countries (and developing countries) and send it to the third world.

Now if we actually had leaders in this country concerned about this nation they would immediately pull any support for this conference and most of the UN for that matter. Where is the 4th Estate on this…why aren’t Journolist screaming about this and asking B Hussein Obama and ALGORE and Ted Turner “Why are you pushing this economic destruction in the name of a global warming?”

Again, I thank God for the Internet and the alternative media…this would never be put on ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS/MSNBC/NYTIMES. I really want to thank Mark Steyn who brought this up while filling in for Rush Limbaugh on his show Friday.

A long few nights and the wisdom of Saturday Night Live

A long week with challenges, joys and the idiocy of the way we secure air travel.

Spent a good hunk of the week in training a rookie right out of the academy…good and bad about that but love the challenge of getting someone to take a book and apply it.  I also had the joy of putting a law student in jail for DWI…something about that makes me feel good. “Here soon to be lawyer, here is your first real experience with the legal system…hey, you can tell your clients I know where you’ve been and it’s not that bad….three hots and a cot!”

Now I look at the joke this Transportation Security Administration is…not has become because it was a disaster from day one. You make jokes of the incompetence of civil service workers and they prove they joke by going beyond it. Take a look at these idiots (source Drudge Report) patting down a child. From the You Tube source material,



Lets get the facts straight first. Before the video started the boy went through a metal detector and didn't set it off but was selected for a pat down. The boy was shy so the TSA couldn't complete the full pat on the young boy. The father tried several times to just hold the boys arms out for the TSA agent but I guess it didn't end up being enough for the guy. I was about 30 ft away so I couldn't hear their conversation if there was any. The enraged father pulled his son shirt off and gave it to the TSA agent to search, that’s when this video begins.

Why the hell are we selecting a child like this for a pat down...I mean this kind of stuff is meant for satire, like this from Saturday Night Live last night.



And the Weekend Update had a few good pointers...here is the WU summary



The difference...at least the writers on SNL limited their perversions to adults or close to adults. In this case the truth is not stranger than fiction...it's more perverted than off color comedy. And we are paying for this. Upwards of 155K a year . Yes, I know the guys making the 155K are senior executive types but with benefits, etc I have no doubt they are making 100K plus a year.

Now, from the TSA's own website the duties of a Transportation Security Officer

Transportation Security Officer


Duties and Responsibilities: Implements security-screening procedures that are central to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) objectives and that will serve to protect the traveling public by preventing any deadly or dangerous objects from being transported onto an aircraft. Assists in conducting screening of passengers, baggage and cargo. May be required to conduct screening at any airport that provides commercial services to the public. Assists in monitoring the flow of passengers through the screening checkpoint to facilitate the orderly and efficient processing of passengers. Maintains close communication with supervisors regarding any issues that might reveal a weakness or vulnerable area of security screening that is discovered in the course of screening duties. Participates in information briefings concerning security-sensitive or classified information.

Key Skills

Ability to learn the theories, dynamics, and factors underlying the aviation screening process to enable authoritative and independent handling of screening functions.

Ability to learn to operate basic security equipment such as X-ray machines and hand wands at screening checkpoints

Ability to work with persons of diverse backgrounds

Ability to communicate non-technical information effectively to others

There is an old saying that familiarity breads contempt. Mediocrity and ridiculousness also breed it. Taxpayers understand the need to insure safety in commercial flights. Humiliating a child enhances our security how? These waste of taxpayer money accomplished what with this facilitation of “the orderly and efficient processing of passengers.” ?

Last week the Drudge Report had this photo with a nun being frisked and the caption was “The Terrorists Have Won”.

Seeing this child have to go through public abuse from thoughtless bureaucrats like this makes one want bring similar abuse on the TSA and the bureaucratic waste who allow this abuse of out liberty.

OK, facilitate the orderly and efficient processing of passengers...and delaying passengers so a child can be harassed like that was making things orderly and efficient how? I see a key skill is Ability to learn the theories, dynamics, and factors underlying the aviation screening process to enable authoritative and independent handling of a screening functions. What ability other than non thinking bureaucratic paper pushing brought to an extreme was shown by three government employees looking seriously like that are actually fulfilling a solemn duty while they are harassing a child whose knowledge of terrorism is from a school class.

Geopolitical Journey, Part 4: Moldova November 18, 2010

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States.


By George Friedman


Moldova is a country in need of explanation, two explanations in fact. First, there is the question of what kind of country Moldova is. Second, there is the question of why anyone should care. Oddly, I went to Moldova thinking I knew the answer to the second question but not the first. I came away unsure of either. Let’s begin with the second question: Why does Moldova matter?


The second article in this series, “Borderlands,” described the re-emergence of Russian regional power following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russian national security is dependent on two countries that became independent following the collapse. Belarus is the buffer between Russia and Europe on the North European Plain. Ukraine is the buffer between Russia and the Carpathian Mountains. From the Russian point of view, dominating these countries is less important than Europe and the United States not dominating them. The Russians have achieved this and perhaps more.

(click here to enlarge image)






Ukraine is Russia’s southwestern anchor and its Achilles’ heel. It is difficult for Russia to be secure without Ukraine both for economic and strategic reasons. Russia would be hard to defend if Ukraine were under the control of a hostile power. What Ukraine is to Russia, Moldova is to Ukraine. It is a salient that makes Ukraine difficult to defend, and if Ukraine can’t be defended Russia can’t be defended either. Or so my reasoning went at the beginning of my visit.


Moldova’s Strategic Position


I had strong historical arguments for this. My thinking was in line with Stalin’s. In 1939, the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. One part of the agreement secretly partitioned Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Another part of the treaty secretly ceded Bessarabia to the Soviets, even though Bessarabia was part of Romania. The Soviets seized Bessarabia in 1940, renaming it the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and changing its boundaries somewhat. Bessarabia can thus be thought of as Moldova’s predecessor.


There were many things the Soviets might have demanded from the Germans, but this, along with eastern Poland, was what they asked for. The reason was strategic:


1. The eastern frontier of Bessarabia, and therefore of Romania, was less than 50 miles from the Soviet port of Odessa, the Soviet Union’s major outlet to the Black and Mediterranean seas.


2. Romania was anchored in the east on the Dniester River. Should the Soviets decide to attack westward at any point, the Dniester was a formidable defensive line.


3. By taking Bessarabia, the Soviets eliminated part of a salient from which Kiev could be threatened.


4. The Soviets pushed their frontier west to the Prut River.


5. The Soviets could interdict the Danube from Bessarabia. Close the Danube and European trade — in this case, German trade — would be damaged.

Stalin wanted to increase Ukraine’s security and increase Romania’s and the Danube basin’s vulnerability. As obscure as it was to the rest of the world, Bessarabia became a key piece on the chessboard between Hitler and Stalin, just as the Russian and Ottoman empires had sought after it before. Places that are of little interest to the rest of the world can be of great importance to great powers.


As it was, the bet didn’t pay off for Stalin, as Hitler attacked the Soviets and quickly seized all the regions conceded to them. But what Stalin lost in 1941, he regained in 1944. He had no intention of returning Bessarabia to Romania. He shifted some Moldovan territory to Ukraine and transferred some Ukrainian territory east of the Dniester River to Moldova. Since it was all under Soviet control, these were merely administrative shifts with no strategic significance at the time.


After the Soviet collapse, this territory became the Republic of Moldova. The portion east of the Dniester revolted with Russian support, and Moldova lost effective control of what was called Transdniestria. Moldova remained in control of the area between the Prut and Dniester rivers, for about 18 years a fairly insignificant region. Indeed, from a global point of view, Moldova was just a place on a map until 2010. The Ukrainian elections of 2010 brought what seems to be a pro-Russian government to power, repudiating the Orange Revolution. As I argued in “Borderlands,” this was a key step in the resurrection of Russian strategic power. Consequently, Moldova began to shift from being a piece of land between two rivers to being a strategic asset for both the Russians and any Western entity that might wish to contain or threaten Ukraine and therefore Russia.


Let me emphasize the idea that it “began to shift,” not that it is now a strategic asset. This is an unfolding process. Its importance depends on three things:


• the power of Russia;


• Russia’s power over Ukraine;


• a response from some Western entity.


These are all moving parts; none is in place. Moldova is therefore a place of emerging importance, as the saying goes. But however slow this process, this fairly obscure country has lost its insignificance, as it does whenever great powers clash in this part of the world.


This is why I wanted to visit Moldova: It seemed to be evolving into strategic terrain, and I wanted to understand it.


The Moldovan Identity


Moldova, of course, is not just a strategic chip. It is a place where people live, caught between their Romanian heritage and their Soviet past. It is a mistake to think of Moldova simply as part of the Romania that had been taken by the Soviets, which once freed from Soviet domination would simply rejoin Romania. Seventy years after the partition, Moldova has become more than a Romanian province, far from a Russian province and something less than a nation. This is where geopolitics and social reality begin to collide.


The Soviets brutalized Moldova. I had a conversation with a Moldovan journalist in which he described how he and his family had been deported in 1948 to Tomsk in Siberia. He put it almost casually; it was the common heritage of Moldovans. Stalin was concerned that the Moldovans would want to rejoin Romania, and although Romania was a Soviet satellite, Stalin didn’t want to take any chances. His solution, repeated many times in many places in the Soviet Union, was the deportation of the Romanian population, importing Russians, a small famine and the terror designed to break the Moldovan spirit.


The difference between Eastern Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union was driven home to me in Moldova. In the Eastern European countries, the Soviet era is regarded as a nightmare and the Russians are deeply distrusted and feared to this day. In Moldova, there is genuine nostalgia for the Soviet period as there is in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, in Moldova communist rule didn’t end in 1992. The Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), heir to the Communist Party that was banned, continued to rule Moldova until 2009. The PCRM was not ideologically communist; it had no real ideology at all. What it offered was continued ties to Russia and a sense of continuity to a country that preferred the familiar.


Bessarabia was a province of Romania, and Bessarabians generally spoke Romanian. In today’s Moldova, Romanian is not the only language spoken. As in most former Soviet republics, Russian is widely spoken, and not simply by Russians living there. For a large part of the Moldovan population, Russian is the preferred language. Older Moldovans were taught Russian in school and learned to use it in everyday life. But younger Moldovans also speak Russian, and signs are in Romanian and Russian. In addition, it was pointed out to me (I don’t speak any Romanian) that the Romanian spoken in Moldova is not quite the same as that spoken in Romania today. It has not evolved the same way and has an archaic cast to it. You can easily distinguish between a Romanian and a Moldovan speaking Romanian.


There is genuine tension about this. A member of our staff who lives in Romania accompanied us to Moldova. She told us about going into a store that sold chocolate. (Apparently, it was quite famous for its chocolates.) When she spoke, her Romanian was clearly distinguishable from the Moldovan variety and obviously from Russian. She was not served, was ignored for a while and then shuttled between lines. As she explained it, the Moldovans feel that Romanians look down on them, and so Moldovans resent them. Obviously, this is a single anecdote, but others spoke of this three-way tension between Romanians, Moldovan Romanian speakers and Russian speakers.


This split runs parallel to political fault lines. While there are those who want union with Romania, this is far from the dominant group. The real struggle is between those who back the communists and those who support an independent Moldova oriented toward the European Union and NATO. In broad terms, the communists’ strength is among the rural, poor and elderly. The pro-Western parties are handicapped by being divided into a series of parties that vary by personality more than ideology. This means that the government created after demonstrators routed the communists in 2009 is a highly fragmented coalition made more fragile by the complex interests, personalities and ambitions of each. The communists may not get a majority, but they don’t need as many coalition partners as do the pro-Western parties.


There will be an election Nov. 28. The country has billboards with various candidates all around and rallies throughout the country. Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are there. Some are funded, we were told, by the American National Endowment for Democracy, others supported by NATO and so on. The Russians, too, have learned the NGO gambit from the West by watching the various color revolutions. Russian-supported NGOs are in the country, and as one journalist told me, they are serving wine and cheese to young people. That appears to be having an impact.


The real issue behind the complex politics is simply this: What is Moldova? There is consensus on what it is not: It is not going to be a province of Romania. But Moldova was a province of Romania and a Soviet Socialist Republic. What is it now? What does it mean to be a Moldovan? On this question I could see no consensus. There are nations that lack a state, like the Kurds. Moldova is a state that lacks a nation. Nation-building in Moldova is not so much about institutions but about creating a national consensus about the nation.


As in Romania, the pro-Western faction has a clear solution to this problem: membership in NATO and membership in the European Union. If they get this, they feel, they will then have a secure definition of a nation — a European country — and protection from the Russians and others who might threaten them. Romania sees membership in these organizations as a way to overcome its past. Moldova sees this as providing definition to their country. But where being European is a general goal in Romania, it is hotly disputed in Moldova, although what the communists want in practice, aside from power, is quite unclear.


And this is the core problem in Moldova. The pro-Western factions’ idea is to join the European Union and NATO and have that stamp a definition on the country. It does not take into account the powerful Communist Party with its Russian ties, nor does it take into account the substantial portion of the country that identifies with Russia rather than with the West. Some of the pro-Western parties, sensitive to this problem, have reached out to the Russians, either with visits to Moscow or indirectly. Committed to the Western option, they are trying to accommodate pro-Russian sentiment. But squaring the circle is not easy, and the basic divisions remain in place. In that sense, the country is in gridlock. Whoever wins this or succeeding elections governs a country that is significantly divided and with very different ideas about what the country should look like and who should govern it.


An Economy of Shadows


This is made even more difficult when you consider Moldova’s economic condition. It is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe, if not the poorest. About 12 percent of its gross domestic product is provided by remittances from emigrants working in other European countries, some illegally. This has fallen from 19 percent, not by economic growth, but since the global recession cut remittances. Romania has begun a program of providing Moldovans with Romanian passports. This allows the Moldovans to travel and work anywhere in the European Union. They were already doing this illegally. Now the process of emigration and remittance has become formal. Some in Moldova charge that this is an attempt by Romania to undermine Moldova by encouraging emigration. But given the remittance situation, it is probably a lifeline.


People in Moldova and in Romania have told me that that the largest export of Moldova is women, who are lured into or willingly join (depending on who you might ask) the Moldovan diaspora to work as prostitutes. Some say (and I can’t verify) that Moldovan women constitute the largest number of prostitutes working in Europe’s legal brothels. This is a discussion for which there are few valid statistics and many opinions. Yet in talking to people, the claim does not seem controversial. This is a sign of a desperate country.


Consider this anecdote from a Saturday night spent walking the streets of Chisinau, the capital. The sidewalks of the main street filled with young people, from their late teens to their mid-twenties. I was told that there were no clubs for young people to party in, so they gather in the streets. That’s not all that odd: It reminds me of Queens Boulevard in New York during my high school years. What was odd was the way they clustered in groups of five to 15. At the center of each group was a small number of girls, one to three, all dressed stunningly compared to the boys, who were one cut above slobs. The oddity was the extent to which the boys outnumbered girls. I could never find out if the other girls were home with their parents or there was a shortage of young women. Regardless, my wife assured me the girls were not wearing cheap clothes; she estimated the boots alone ran into the hundreds of dollars.


I don’t quite know how to read this, but add to this the fact that there were bank branches up and down the main street. When we visited a small town north of the capital, it also had a string of bank branches lining the street. Bank branches are expensive to build and maintain. They need depositors to keep them going, and when you have seven competing banks in a small town that means there is money there. Certainly, the town didn’t look poor.


So, we have a paradox. The numbers say Moldova is extremely poor, yet there are lots of banks and well and expensively dressed young women. The young men all seemed to share my taste in clothes, which might come from poverty or indifference, so they don’t fit the analysis. But I am fairly confident in saying that the official statistics of Moldova and the economic reality are not in sync.

Soviet style apartments in Chisinau (Photo by STRATFOR)


There are three possible explanations. The first is that remittances are flooding the country, from women or other expatriates, and that the banks are there to service the money coming in. The second is that there is a massive shadow economy that evades regulation, taxation and statistical analysis. The third explanation is that the capital and a few towns are fairly affluent while the rural areas are extraordinarily poor. (I saw some Soviet-era apartments that might confirm that.) I suspect the answer is all three are correct, explaining the split politics in the country.


The Republic of Moldova has a profound identity crisis, a deeply divided political system and an economy which does not have, as they say, full transparency. It is therefore difficult to think about it geopolitically.


Moldova and Strategy


From the Moldovan point of view, at least among the pro-Western factions, Moldova’s strategic problems begin and end with Transdniestria. They want to regain the east bank of the river. The region would have real benefits for Moldova, as it would be its industrial heartland, in relative terms at least. Like some other disputed territories in the former Soviet Union, however, it is the dispute, more than the strategic value of the territory, that is important. It is a rallying point, or at least an attempt to find one. It also a basis for pro-Western groups to attack pro-Russian groups since the Russians protect the breakaway region.


The Germans, who are getting close to the Russians, appear to be trying to facilitate negotiations regarding Transdniestria. The Russians may accommodate the Germans. But if they do, I doubt the outcome will deny the Russians control of the east bank of the Dniester. From the Russian point of view, hostile forces east of the Dniester could threaten Odessa, and they see no reason to leave the Dniester River regardless of how benign conditions appear right now. The Russian view, driven home by history, is that benign situations can turn malignant with remarkable speed.


There is an oddity here, of course. I am talking about Russian troops on the Dniester, but this in a country surrounded by Ukraine, not Russia. The Russians are supporting the Transdniestrian republic while the Ukrainians have not. Since 1992, the Ukrainians have not made an effective demand for the Russians to stop interfering in what is essentially a Ukrainian-Moldovan issue. This might be because the Ukrainians don’t want other lands that had been taken from Moldova and given to Ukraine put on the table as a bargaining chip. But I suspect the reason is simpler: Regardless of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians are the ones concerned about things like a defensive river position while the Ukrainians see the matter with more detachment.


A Net Assessment


On a map, Moldova is valuable real estate. It is a region that in the hands of NATO or any other Western power could provide leverage against Russian power, and perhaps strengthen Ukraine’s desire to resist Russia. Putting NATO troops close to Odessa, a Ukrainian port Russians depend on, would cause the Russians to be cautious. The problem is that the Russians clearly understand this and are doing what they can to create a pro-Russian state in Moldova, or at least a state sufficiently unstable that no one can use it to threaten the Russians.


Moldova is caught between its Romanian roots and its Soviet past. It has not developed a national identity independent of these two poles. Moldova is a borderland-within-a-borderland. It is a place of foreign influences from all sides. But it is a place without a clear center. On one side, there is nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet Union — which gives you a sense of how bad things are now for many Moldovans. On the other side is hope that the European Union and NATO will create and defend a nation that doesn’t exist.


If geopolitics were a theoretical game, then the logical move would be to integrate Moldova into NATO immediately and make it a member of the European Union. There are equally strange nations that are members of each. But geopolitics teaches that the foundation of national strategy is the existence of a nation. That may be obvious, but it is something that needs to be said. I came to Moldova looking in the borderland for a nation that might be a counter to Russian resurgence. I thought I had found the nation on the map. It turned out that while there were people living there, they were not a nation. What appeared promising on a map was very different in reality.


This is not to say that Moldova cannot evolve a sense of nationhood and identity. But such things take a long time to create and rarely emerge peacefully. In the meantime, powerful forces on all sides might make the creation of a Moldovan nation difficult if not impossible. This may well be a case of a state that could forge a nation if it were a member of the European Union and NATO, but the European Union is dealing with Ireland, and NATO has no appetite to confront Russia. This will be up to the Moldovans. It is not clear to me how much time history will give them to reach a consensus.


It is certainly not for me to advise the Moldovans, since I don’t share their fate. But given that I won’t be listened to anyway, I will offer this observation. Moldova was once part of Romania. It was once part of the Soviet Union. Moldova makes a great deal of sense as part of something. The Soviet Union is gone. Europe has more problems than it can handle already; it is not looking for more. Romania is still there. It is not a perfect solution, and certainly not one many Moldovans would welcome, but it is a solution, however imperfect.


I leave now for a place that has no doubt that it is a nation but is engaged in a debate as to what kind of nation it should be: Turkey.

OK...taxes and a budget cannot make it through the Senate, but a web censorship bill does...why

Anyone who loves liberty loves the Internet (Thanks ALGORE ;<)  ). How else would you have gotten message out from Iran when it had its recent troubles or Dan Rather would have gotten away with his plot to pull the 04 election to John F Kerry, the Haughty French looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.

Now this Congress is full of oxygen thieves who cannot do anything required of them by the Constitution and law, such as pass a budget or oversee the actions of the Executive Branch. But for some reason they can seize multiple industries (auto, health care, student loans) and now can give this president and his Attorney General the power to shut down web sites

Web Censorship Bill Sails Through Senate Committee Epicenter Wired.com
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.”


COICA is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and the big media companies to stem the tidal wave of internet file sharing that has upended those industries and, they claim, cost them tens of billions of dollars over the last decade.


...Many people opposed to the bill agree in principle with its aims: Illegal music piracy is, well, illegal, and should be stopped. Musicians, artists and content creators should be compensated for their work. But the law’s critics do not believe that giving the federal government the right to shut down websites at will based upon a vague and arbitrary standard of evidence, even if no law-breaking has been proved, is a particularly good idea. COICA must still be approved by the full House and Senate before becoming law. A vote is unlikely before the new year.


Among the sites that could go dark if the law passes: Dropbox, RapidShare, SoundCloud, Hype Machine and any other site for which the Attorney General deems copyright infringement to be “central to the activity” of the site, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that opposes the bill. There need not even be illegal content on a site — links alone will qualify a site for digital death. Websites at risk could also theoretically include p2pnet and pirate-party.us or any other website that advocates for peer-to-peer file sharing or rejects copyright law, according to the group.


In short, COICA would allow the federal government to censor the internet without due process.

And that is its purpose.  Hopefully this won't get anywhere near the floor before the Republicans take the house.  This administration has shown itself completely untrustworthy and it will use power to punish enemies (why is it auto dealerships that were making money were shut down…wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact they gave money to the Republicans would it?) and reward its friends (Black Panthers really didn’t intimidate anyone at the polls did they).  But more to the point could this Just Us Department or a legitimate Justice Department be trusted with this kind of power?  The answer is not no but hell no.  An administration that falsified data to a judge to keep their drilling ban going would lie in an instant to get Rush Limbaugh or Foxnews.com shut down.   Would it be out of the realm of possibility that they would go to a pet judge and say “The Drudge Report is full of copyright infringements and needs to be shut down…” just before a critical legislative vote or election.

Let us pray this bill dies the disrespectful death it needs…and with any luck the authors of this abomination of law and abuse of people’s liberty are some of the soon to be unemployed in the capital.

Officer Down

Trooper Jonathan McDonaldTexas Highway Patrol
End of Watch: Monday, November 15, 2010
Age: 28
Trooper Jonathan McDonald was killed in an automobile accident on U.S. 84 while responding to another accident near Post, Texas. He was involved in a single vehicle crash during the response.

Trooper McDonald is survived by his wife and 7-month-old child.

Rest in Peace Bro…We’ll Continue The Watch

Day is done, Gone the sun, From the lake, From the hills, From the sky. All is well, Safely rest, God is nigh.

Officer Down

Correctional Officer Gary M. Chapin

Crawford County Pennsylvania Correctional Facility
End of Watch: Monday, November 15, 2010
Age: 49
Tour of Duty: 3 years, 8 months
Date of Incident: Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Correctional Officer Gary Chapin succumbed to injuries sustained one month earlier after being attacked and beaten by an inmate in the Crawford County Correctional Facility.

Officer Chapin was transported to Wesbury United Methodist Community Hospital but never regained consciousness after the attack.

The inmate who beat him was in jail on a parole violation at the time. The assault occurred because the inmate was upset about an unsharpened pencil. The inmate was charged with criminal homicide.

Officer Chapin had served with the Crawford County Correctional Facility for almost four years. He is survived by his wife and children.

Rest in Peace Bro…We’ll Continue The Watch


Day is done, Gone the sun, From the lake, From the hills, From the sky. All is well, Safely rest, God is nigh.