Thursday, June 26, 2008

Marty Lederman Gets Shrill on John Yoo

Marty Lederman on John Yoo:

Balkinization: John Yoo Testimony: Here are John Yoo's prepared remarks for the hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this morning. (I don't believe David Addington is submitting a prepared statement.) CSPAN covering it live here. I'm out of town and don't have time just now to blog in detail about this statement, except for a handful of very quick reactions:

  1. John claims that the 2004 Levin torture memo, which superseded his 2002 OLC opinion, concluded that all interrogation methods OLC had previously approved as legal "were still legal." We now know that that's dead wrong. As Levin testified before this same committee last week, the footnote in question, which Attorney General Gonzales insisted that OLC include, merely indicated that the writers of the 2002 memos -- i.e., John Yoo -- would not have changed their bottom line, even if they had employed Levin's analysis. Levin himself, however, was uncertain about the legality of some of the CIA techniques, and was in the process of reviewing them when he was effectively removed from OLC.

  2. John is testifying that his torture memos could have had no bearing on the abuse that took place in Iraq, because "the Geneva Conventions provided the relevant rules for the war in Iraq." There are several problems with this statement. Most important is that OLC itself, when John was there, had advised the Pentagon that the Fourth Geneva Convention did not protect "unlawful combatants," which includes most if not all of the insurgents in Iraq. (See page 4 of the April 2003 DOD Working Group Report.) As Jack Goldsmith reports in his book, the very first thing he decided when he arrived at OLC in October 2003 was that the Fourth Geneva Convention did protect Iraqi civilians -- a decision that hocked and dismayed the White House. It is fairly clear (as reflected in the Working Group Report) that until that time, the Administration, based presumably on John's own advice, was acting on the assumption that the insurgents in Iraq were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. This explains why, according to several reports (most importantly those of Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer), the Pentagon and CIA placed Special Forces and CIA operatives in Iraq in 2001 or 2002, whose basic instructions were that there was no law -- certainly not Geneva -- that protected detainees, and that the "gloves were off" and that they could engage in widespread, wanton abuse and cruelty. Which they did. (And as the Fay, Jones and Schlesinger Reports found, and many accounts attest, the conspicuous abuse by CIA and Special Forces in Iraq was an important contributing factor to the breakdown of ordinary norms among the regular military forces, as well.) The Pentagon and CIA would not have given these forces the green light to abuse prisoners if OLC had not previously advised that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any relevant statutes stood in the way of such abuse. Finally, John's broad Commander-in-Chief override theory, which was a prominent part of the DOD Working Group Report, and which was briefed to General Miller on his way to "GTMOize" Iraq, obviously conveyed the message that the President could ignore any applicable statutes and treaties, even if they would otherwise apply. John's legal advice, then, was a fairly direct cause -- certainly a necessary cause -- of the abuse in Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

  3. John stresses, as he has in the past, that he was without much guidance in interpreting the federal torture statute, since there had not been any prosecutions under it, or any court cases construing it. But the virtually identical definition of "torture" is included in statutes governing removal of aliens and asylum applications, and that definition had received extensive treatment from courts under those statutes (which were also enacted in order to implement the Convention Against Torture). The INS and the State Department, therefore, had very extensive knowledge and expertise on the question. And yet those experts were cut out of the loop -- they were not consulted on the OLC opinion. Indeed, John's testimony states that the NSC ordered OLC not to discuss its work with the State Department! -- something that is in itself fairly scandalous.

  4. John states that his 2002 torture opinion was "reviewed, edited and re-written by the assistant attorney general in charge of the office at the time [Jay Bybee], as is the case with all opinions that issue from OLC." John is correct that virtually all written OLC opinions -- certainly those of great importance or dispute -- are at the very least reviewed by the AAG. How, then, does he explain the fact that two of the most momentous OLC opinions has ever issued -- the September 25, 2001 Opinion on the President's war powers and the March 14, 2003 opinion informing DOD (over the vociferous objections of numerous DOD lawyers) that its interrogators had virtual carte blanche to ignore federal statutes -- were signed by John Yoo himself (a mere deputy), rather than by the head of OLC (Dan Koffsky in 2001; Jay Bybee in 2003)?

Posted 8:42 AM by Marty Lederman [link]

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoa!!"

Joe Klein:

Surge Protection - Swampland - TIME: The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies...

I really don't think it works that way. It's not that loyalties are in any sense "divided." Instead, it's an inability to even think of the idea that (interest of Likud) ≠ (interest of Israel) ≠ (interest of United States) or the idea that (interest of Texas oil barons) ≠ (interest of United States of America)...

And Andrew Sullivan is shrill too:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: Max Boot is admirably candid. He helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more:

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq - for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies.

Their security? Heh. In fifty years' time, the Iraqis will not be able to defend themselves against Iran? Or Syria? Please. If they've managed this much progress in the last year, we could be almost out of there in the next president's term of office. Even under Saddam, the Iraqis weren't defeated by the Iranian mullahs. Notice also how a few months of relative calm are instantly deployed to justify a century of occupation. Can you imagine what the next platform for invasion will be? And on what planet does Boot live to think that permanent US troops in the heart of the Muslim Middle East will not require endless, endless fighting?

This obviously isn't about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It's about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. And Joe Klein is in no way engaging in anti-Semitism - please - by pointing out the increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel (even though many Israelis were against it):

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the "benign domino theory" that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn't, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel?

Joe Klein Is Shrill!!

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoa!!"

Joe Klein:

Surge Protection - Swampland - TIME: The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies...

I really don't think it works that way. It's not that loyalties are in any sense "divided." Instead, it's an inability to even think of the idea that (interest of Likud) ≠ (interest of Israel) ≠ (interest of United States) or the idea that (interest of Texas oil barons) ≠ (interest of United States of America)...

And Andrew Sullivan is shrill too:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: Max Boot is admirably candid. He helps us realize that this election is indeed at root a decision on whether to keep troops in Iraq for the next century or more:

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq - for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies.

Their security? Heh. In fifty years' time, the Iraqis will not be able to defend themselves against Iran? Or Syria? Please. If they've managed this much progress in the last year, we could be almost out of there in the next president's term of office. Even under Saddam, the Iraqis weren't defeated by the Iranian mullahs. Notice also how a few months of relative calm are instantly deployed to justify a century of occupation. Can you imagine what the next platform for invasion will be? And on what planet does Boot live to think that permanent US troops in the heart of the Muslim Middle East will not require endless, endless fighting?

This obviously isn't about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It's about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel. And Joe Klein is in no way engaging in anti-Semitism - please - by pointing out the increasingly obvious fact that the Iraq war was in part launched to assist Israel (even though many Israelis were against it):

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the "benign domino theory" that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn't, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel?

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Stupidest Man Alive: Patrick J. Buchanan

Donald Luskin cannot match this, from Pat Buchanan:

Was the Holocaust Inevitable?: In every crisis the Kaiser [Wilhelm II] blundered into, including his foolish [July 1914] "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted...

World War I "erupted" on August 4, 1914 when five German armies crossed the Belgian border. That's some "backing away"...

And nobody can match this, from Pat Buchanan:

[Hitler] sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.... That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable.... But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America, and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll...

Is Buchanan really saying: "If only the British had let Hitler win!"?

Jim Henley: Why the Republican Party Must Be Destroyed

Jim Henley provides the best argument I have seen on why the Republican Party must, for the good of the nation and the world, be destroyed immediately:

The Art of the Possible » Blog Archive » A (Public) Choice, Not an Echo: No matter who wins the election, so-called neoconservatives will probably remain the prime movers of Republican foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

  1. They are the energized constituency within the Party. They care more about foreign policy than any other component except a slice of the paleos.
  2. Neoconservatives have prominent media platforms that are useful to the GOP as a whole.
  3. Neoconservatism is useful to important elements of the GOP coalition. It implies spiraling increases to military spending. It is a coherent nationalism for the nationalist party to embrace. It provides a ready-made critique of the domestic political opposition (”appeasers!”).
  4. The “stab-in-the-back” narrative is a perfect example of the kind of magical thinking that explains away failure. The rituals didn’t fail us, we failed the rituals! This has worked for thousands of years. As sure as shooting, bad things will happen around the globe during an Obama administration. An Obama administration may even - gasp! - err in response to a crisis. The beauty of neoconservative ideology is that there is always some war that could, theoretically, have been launched at some point that didn’t get fought, and it will always be possible to claim that “if only” America had had the “will and imagination” to kill just those extra few foreigners, everything would have turned out different and better.
  5. Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP and the social goals of the evangelicals. >6. It’s important to remember that first-generation neoconservatism was conservatism: the neocons shared the extant right-wing concerns about crime; the relationship of dependency to the welfare state; “bending over backwards” to ameliorate racism; changing family patterns. For every PJ O’Rourke-style Republican Party Reptile who merely wanted to cut taxes and “Give War a Chance,” there was a Norman Podhoretz or Daniel Patrick Moynihan concerned that “the blacks” were literally on their way to becoming a separate species.
  6. Evangelicals and paleocons are not an identity. The nationalist self-satisfaction of neoconservatism - American hegemony is morally good - fits mainstream evangelicalism’s view of (Judeo-)Christian America as anointed by God. (And, of course, at war with Islam.) 8, Paleoconservatism does not play well with others. Its foreign policy does not lead to high defense budgets. Its immigration policy does not maximize cheap labor. Its preference for localism can foster hostility to agribusiness and large retailers. It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.

Simply put, outside of anti-Semitic fantasies, small groups of mostly Jewish intellectuals don’t bamboozle large Gentile institutions - and the Republican Party is nothing if not a large Gentile institution - into betraying their own perceived best interests. So-called neoconservatism became, by mid-decade, simply Republican foreign policy. The base assumptions of the GOP base and elite just are neoconservative. And that happened because the ideology of neoconservatism served Republican-Party interests and accorded with preexisting Republican-Party proclivities.

The question is whether one possible electoral defeat this year changes those interests significantly. My inclination is, no. Every country is going to have a nationalist party. This particular country’s nationalist party is still going to want to justify massive defense budgets, flatter the nation about its righteousness and paint its opponents as “on the other side.” Paleo-ism cuts against too many of those interests. The so-called Realists don’t inspire passion. Too many other rationales for an American nationalist party - from immigration to homophobia - are demographically doomed. So-called Neoconservatism is much more of a unifying factor than a source of division for the GOP and likely to remain so.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Spencer Ackerman Looks at the Bushies

He writes, and he is shrill:

History Through a Bush Lens: If your legacy consisted of two draining wars, close to 5,000 U.S. fatalities, the spread of anti-Americanism around the globe, the alienation of traditional allies and general discredit, you might attempt revisionist history yourself.

Over the last few weeks, prominent members of President George W. Bush's foreign-policy team -- some speaking for themselves, others speaking to leading journalists -- have sought a reconsideration of the administration's reputation. At stake is whether history will record something valuable out of a foreign policy now considered something of a disaster, even by many on the right.

Contending that the administration has left a record worth building on, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.... Robert D. Kaplan [fluffing for] much-maligned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a less-negative light than has been typical. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush's fare-thee-well tour of Europe last week seemed designed to ask: Was it really so bad?

Some diplomatic historians and former Army officers answer: Yes, it really was.

Lloyd C. Gardner.... "Even after several years," said Gardner, "it remains hard to understand how such an ahistorical judgment [as the Iraq war] convinced policy-makers they were right." A retired Army officer compared Rumsfeld's style of dealing with the Army to a child torturing small animals.

Rice's article tacitly affirms Gardner's point. Her Foreign Affairs article tours the global horizon as the sun sets on the Bush administration. She elides Iraq and Afghanistan, preferring to focus on great-power management. Befitting Rice's background as a Soviet expert, she argues early in her piece that Russia poses little threat to the international order. China, India and Brazil all should be cheered into the family of great powers.

"And as these emerging powers change the geopolitical landscape," she writes, "it will be important that international institutions also change to reflect this reality. This is why President Bush has made clear his support for a reasonable expansion of the U.N. Security Council." Yet few will think of "expansion of the U.N. Security Council" when they think of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In any event, the council has the same five members it did in January 2001.

She becomes incoherent when describing the virtues of democracy. "Democratic development is a unified political-economic model, and it offers the mix of flexibility and stability that best enables states to seize globalization's opportunities and manage its challenges," Rice argues. "And for those who think otherwise: What real alternative worthy of America is there?" Those who "think otherwise" include Rice, in her almost fawning descriptions of authoritarian Russia and China. Were Rice consistent, she would be arguing for aggressive U.S. democratization efforts in both great powers. The fact that she doesn't leads to the cynical interpretation that democracy is only a ruse for the Bush administration to confront its weaker adversaries.

Similar problems arise when Rice finally deals with the Muslim world. Arguing on behalf of the Bush Doctrine of democracy imposed abroad through military force, she essentially claims that alternative courses of action fail to address the real roots of terrorism. In the past, "we supported authoritarian regimes, and they supported our shared interest in regional stability," she writes. "After Sept. 11, it became increasingly clear that this old bargain had produced false stability."

Yet the administration still supports authoritarian Mideast regimes, like those in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the Gulf states that offer the U.S. discounted oil and military bases. Rice does not deal with the alternative contention that the feeding trough for Mideast radicalism and instability might have something to do with the Arab sense of outrage over the U.S. occupation of Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Rice's discussion of Iraq comes late in the article. She defends the invasion, and stretches the truth to do so. "The Iraq Survey Group showed [that] Saddam was ready and willing to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs as soon as international pressure had dissipated," Rice writes. In fact, the Iraq Survey Group also showed that Iraq's WMD programs were in a pitiful state of disrepair, meaning that Rice is neglecting the actual question of what Saddam Hussein could have done with the chimerical one of what he wanted to do. Ultimately, Rice punts on the Iraq war: "This story is still being written, and will be for many years to come." (Interestingly, the word "Afghanistan" appears only three times.)

In response, Michael Hirsch of Newsweek observed, "If she's not sure that things are better, why should the rest of us be?"

Rice's elevation of peripheral aspects of Bush's foreign policy to a place of centrality underscore the administration's mistakes, Gardner said. "Bush certainly was not unique among either American or world leaders in miscalculating the fruits of war," Gardner said, contending that Bush's mistakes come from a broader, technology-stoked perception of American omnipotence. "Americans, however, have been seduced for a long time by the supposed charms of technology."

If Rice's essay is evasive, so is Kaplan's defense of Rumsfeld in The Atlantic. The two pieces contain a similar element: both portray peripheral policy choices as the criteria by which the administration should be judged.

"Thanks to his long tenure and personal dynamism," Kaplan writes, "Rumsfeld has had an impact that will go far beyond Iraq in shaping the actions of future administrations. Obsessed with what could go wrong, Rumsfeld was a brilliant worrier. It is in his... pessimism where we might find some saving graces to his legacy."

Those saving graces, Kaplan writes, are the former defense secretary's fears that terrorist groups can't be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction, and that Gen. Colin L. Powell's doctrine of using overwhelming military force -- or none at all -- in response to aggression was an outdated relic of the Cold War. "Rumsfeld worried that the world was too messy, too fluid—with one crisis flowing into the next across geographical regions—and the dangers facing America too complex and varied for such a cut-and-dried approach," Kaplan writes.

Such an approach led Rumsfeld to embrace preventive war, and to wage it using smaller ground-force components than Army officials thought prudent, supplementing their use with on-battlefield information technology for greater surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence work. His theory -- which he called "transformation" -- was that getting soldiers "networked" to each other was more important than having many of them.

But Kaplan's revisionism whitewashes the actual policy choices Rumsfeld adopted. For a defense secretary allegedly eager to transcend Cold War paradigms, Rumsfeld's theological commitment to the decades-old right-wing dream of a ballistic missile defense system is, at least, puzzling.

At the same time, his tech-heavy "transformation" project intended to replace the Powell Doctrine, even Kaplan has to admit, failed its most important tests. "[B]y violating aspects of the Powell doctrine in Iraq," he writes, "Rumsfeld and his subordinates arguably showed themselves to be precisely the stupid civilians the doctrine was meant to guard against."

Army soldiers, and particularly veterans of the wars, aren't as eager as Kaplan to turn the page on Rumsfeld. "There's an argument out there contending Donald Rumsfeld wasn't a complete disaster as a secretary of defense if for no other reason than he helped re-establish strong civilian control over the military -- a prerequisite for any kind of transformation agenda," said Andrew Exum, an Army veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. "After all, the argument goes, the generals aren't going to reform themselves. This argument, I feel, isn't as persuasive now that we have seen the effect of Secretary [Robert] Gates, who has managed to both be firm with the generals while at the same time earning their respect -- and the respect of the Congress -- with his quiet competence and less confrontational demeanor."

One retired Army officer who saw Iraq planning up close also finds these recent efforts to whitewash Rumsfeld unpersuasive. He saw how Rumsfeld considered testing his pet theories more important than meticulous planning. "Detailed war planning for Iraq began in the fall of 2002," this officer, who requested anonymity, remembered. "I asked a fellow planner, one very late night in Kuwait, 'Dude, why are we doing this?' His response [was] 'I have no fucking idea.' He was the lead planner for the ground war."

But Rumsfeld had little patience with what he considered quotidian concerns. This ex-officer recalled briefing Rumsfeld as being an aggravating experience. "He took perverse joy in humiliating officers, usually majors-colonel level. We always called it 'kicking puppies,'" the officer said. "Officers had to appear in full dress uniform, and usually stood at attention while doing a 'desk side' brief to [Rumsfeld]. Rummy would wear a sweater -- think of a warped Mr. Rogers -- put his feet on the desk, and start flipping through slides. Some poor guy, who put two years of his life into whatever he was pitching, would be told things like 'this isn't very detailed.' Well, no, Mr. Dumbass. what you are reading is a 10-slide synopsis of a 400-page operations plan."

Not every member of the defense establishment agrees. One former civilian Pentagon analyst viewed Rumsfeld more favorably, and unlike Kaplan, defended Rumsfeld and the administration on the decision to invade Iraq. "The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration agreed on the need to topple Saddam without agreeing on precisely why they needed to do that," said the analyst, who also requested anonymity. "If the intel had been more inconclusive and fragmentary and ambivalent, you would have lost [then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage and Powell maybe, but not me or [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith or Rumsfeld.

"For me," the analyst continued, "it was the uncertainty and lack of transparency that constituted the threat [from Saddam] all along -- so the intel on stockpiles was irrelevant to me -- but of course, we might not have been able to generate the necessary political support for the action on that basis. And certainly not without laying down a lot of groundwork first." Bush's own attempt at making nice with history was evident last week in Europe. In a valedictory interview with the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London, Bush regretted using bellicose language early in his administration and said it led to the U.S.-European divisions that plagued his first term. Telling Iraqi insurgents about to attack U.S. troops to "bring them on," he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

What he didn't say -- and neither do his subordinates -- was that the Europeans' impression might have had less to do with his language than with his unprovoked invasion of another country. That invasion, more than anything else, will be the administration's legacy.

And that invasion may have hastened American decline. "Bush is the worst" president in recent history, Gardner said, "only because he is caught at the end of the empire -- and will forever be associated with it."

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ben on the Asteroid Menace of Gregg Easterbrook (June 16, 2008) - The Asteroid Menace (Domestic Policy)

He puts his finger on the big problem: it's not that Easterbrook is simply wrong all the time--then you could simply reverse the polarity:

Matthew Yglesias: The Asteroid Menace: Parts of this article approach a reasonable treatment of the subject and parts are Easterbrookian breathlessness. For example, there's a sentence about how if the Oort Cloud exists, it would multiply the number of (scary, dangerous) comets by some large number. That's not right. We infer that the Oort Cloud of comets is out there because the comets we see have to come from somewhere. We already have a good idea of how many comets are perturbed in to the inner solar system per year, because comets are easier to detect than small asteroids.

Another example is in the odds per century of a Tunguska-type airburst. Well, yes, they are probably common (perhaps one every century or few) but over the vast majority of the earth's area, a Tunguska-size airburst will harm few or no people.

That said, the general idea that a comprehensive survey of near-Earth objects is important is correct. It's also relatively inexpensive and inoffensive, as it requires telescopes, detectors, and software, but nothing offensive, no launch vehicles, no nukes.... As far as I know, the Air Force is funding Pan-STARRS officially to track NEOs and unofficially to track satellites. It's not a big mystery or hidden agenda. Well, the satellite part is a little hidden (I certainly don't know for sure, and if I did, I couldn't post about it)...