Secretary Gates creates incentive program to find $7 billion in savings and unnecessary elements of Defense budget.  According to William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary this is not just another effort at eliminating waste. This is an effort to change the way the defense department prioritizes its budget:

“You are not going to be able to do it just on pure efficiencies. You are going to have to eliminate lower-priority programs. You are going to have to find headquarters that you don’t think you need. You are going to have to find staffs that you think you can cut.”

 In a related story “fiscal” conservatives like John Boehner, frequently heard belittling others for their spending ways, did not step up to remove a $485 million anonymous earmark that was added to a House defense authorization bill. CNN reports:

 ”At issue is the alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter platform, a corporate subsidized boondoggle that has cost taxpayers $1.2 billion in earmarks since 2004. It is estimated to cost at least $2.9 billion more until its completion.”

Secretary of Defense Gates has advised President Obama to veto the effort if it makes it to the White House.

Once again from The Daily Dish: 

Abraham Lincoln’s General Orders, 100 Instructions for the government of the armies of the United States in the field. 

“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty–that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. 

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good . . . Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

The Daily Dish points out a “factual account of who was seized and imprisoned at Gitmo”.

Andy Worthington: The Definitive Prisoner List

Key Points

1. “At least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.”
2. “Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (532 under Bush, 42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained. “

Sullivan also points to an article by Stuart Taylor in the Atlantic to debunk many of the assertions that continue to be made by those who support Guantánamo and the use of torture. There is no doubt that there is a dangerous enemy and it remains a primary responsibility of government to be ever vigilant. However, there were dangerous enemies before and there will be dangerous enemies again. They will become more clever or utilize ever more exotic techologies. It is the nature of the human condition. Why is it necessary to create false information to enhance fear, or to abandon core principles for the purpose of expediency?* This is not an exhibition of sound leadership, or strength in the face of an enemy, but the actions of scared men.

———-
* Simple act of “due process”  which traces back to English Common Law and the Magna Carta in 1215.

Camille Paglia, commenting on President Obama’s Middle East speech:

The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing — which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days.

MIT Technology Review looks at the Price of Biofuel. Despite considerable goverment support, the market limitations of corn ethanol are being realized as the high price of corn matched with the drop in the price of ethanol has eliminated profits. Other new biofuel technologies are still years away.

Other points the article makes:

• The production of ethanol from corn is contributing to the rise in the cost of food.
• There are high energy requirements in ethanol production, both to grow corn and convert the kernals into fuel.
• As energy policy ethanol is not making sense- even if all corn produced in US were used it would “the biofuel would still displace only 12 percent of gasoline consumption.”
• Other “cellulosic” material (such as wood, agricultural residues, switchgrass) take less energy to grow, but is too expensive to produce into fuel alternative using current technology due to costly distillation step required at the end of the fermentation process.
• SunEthanol a company in Amherst, MA is attempting to use natural bacteria to break down cellulosic material faster. Several other companies such as LS9 and Amyris are looking into the creation of novel hydrocarbons from genetically engineered microbes that eliminate the distillation step

To refute the biofuels naysayers Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valleys most successful VCs is quoted in the article with the following:

Biomass is the only feedstock in sufficient quantities to cost-effectively replace oil,…..nothing else exists……hybrid and electric vehicles, are just toys and any technology not adoptable by China and India is irrelevant to climate change….. environmentalists don’t focus on scala­bility….. if you can’t scale it up, it is just a toy. Hence the need for biofuels. Hence biofuels from biomass.” H

His views on corn ethanol is that it was a stepping stone to biomass fuels, which has allowed ethanol market infrastructure to develop.